And yet to play out, let’s also not forget Al Gore’s 2008 prediction: “Entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years”
-Anthony
By Dennis Avery in the Canada Free Press
“2008 will be the hottest year in a century:” The Old Farmers’ Almanac, September 11, 2008, Hurricanes, Arctic Ice, Coral, Drinking water, Aspen skiing
We’re now well into the earth’s third straight harsher winter-but in late 2007 it was still hard to forget 22 straight years of global warming from 1976-1998. So the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted 2008 would be the hottest year in the last 100.
But sunspots had been predicting major cooling since 2000, and global temperatures turned downward in early 2007. The sunspots have had a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s thermometers since 1860. Today’s temperatures are about on a par with 1940. For 2008, the Almanac hired a new climatologist, Joe D’Aleo, who says the declining sunspots and the cool phase of the Pacific Ocean predict 25-30 years of cooler temperatures for the planet.
“You could potentially sail, kayak or even swim to the North Pole by the end of the summer. Climate scientists say that the Arctic ice . . . is currently on track to melt sometime in 2008.” Ted Alvarez, Backpacker Magazine Blogs, June, 2008.
Soon after this prediction, a huge Russian icebreaker got trapped in the thick ice of the Northwest Passage for a full week. The Arctic ice hadn’t melted in 2007, it got blown
into warmer southern waters. Now it’s back. (Reference)
Remember too the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. Polish climatologist Rajmund Przbylak says “the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s” based on more than 40 Arctic temperature stations.
(This uneducated prediction may have been the catalyst for Lewis Pugh and his absurd kayak stunt that failed miserably – Anthony)
“Australia’s Cities Will Run Out of Drinking Water Due to Global Warming.”
Tim Flannery was named Australia’s Man of the Year in 2007-for predicting that Australian cities will run out of water. He predicted Perth would become the “first 21st century ghost city,’ and that Sydney would be out of water by 2007. Today however, Australia’s city reservoirs are amply filled. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun reminds us Australia is truly a land of long droughts and flooding rains.
“Hurricane Effects Will Only Get Worse.” Live Science, September 19, 2008.
So wrote the on-line tech website Live Science, but the number of Atlantic hurricanes 2006-2008 has been 22 percent below average, with insured losses more than 50 percent below average. The British Navy recorded more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes in the last part of the Little Ice Age (1700-1850) as during the much-warmer last half of the 20th century.
“Corals will become increasingly rare on reef systems.” Dr. Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, head of Queensland University (Australia) marine studies.
In 2006, Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg warned that high temperatures might kill 30-40 percent of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef “within a month.” In 2007, he said global warming temperatures were bleaching [potentially killing] the reef.
But, in 2008, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said climate change had not damaged the “well-managed” reef in the four years since its last report. Veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen no heat damage to the reef at all. “The only change I’ve seen has been the result of over-fishing, pollution, too many tourists or people dropping anchors on the reef,” he said.
No More Skiing? “Climate Change and Aspen,” Aspen, CO city-funded study, June, 2007.
Aspen’s study predicted global warming would change the climate to resemble hot, dry Amarillo, Texas. But in 2008, European ski resorts opened a month early, after Switzerland recorded more October snow than ever before. Would-be skiers in Aspen had lots of winter snow-but a chill factor of 18 below zero F. kept them at their fireplaces instead of on the slopes.
*Sources:
Predictions of 25-30 year cooling due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation: Scafetta and West, 2006, “Phenomenological Solar Signature in 400 Years of Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere Temperature Record,” Geophysical Research Letters.
Arctic Warmer in the 1930s: R. Przybylak, 2000, “Temporal and Spatial Variation of Surface Air Temperature over the Period of Instrumental Observation in the Arctic,” International Journal of Climatology 20.
British Navy records of Caribbean hurricanes 1700-1850: J.B. Elsner et al., 2000, “Spatial Variations in Major U.S. Hurricane Activity,” Journal of Climate 13.
Predictions of coral loss: Hoegh-Guldberg et al., Science, Vol. 318, 2007. Status of Coral Reefs of the World 2008, issued by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, Nov., 2008.
Aspen climate change study: Climate Change and Aspen: An Assessment of Potential Impacts and Responses, Aspen Global Change Institute, June, 2007.
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Dennis T. Avery, is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute in Washington. Dennis is the Director for Global Food Issues ([url=http://www.cgfi.org]http://www.cgfi.org[/url]). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State.
Aussie John (12:42:10) ~ Ah… you young’uns. I remember Victorian summers in degrees F. from the 40s and 50s, and one hundred degrees in the shade was a cool change back then…
MartinGAtkins (14:45:24) : “My prophecy for the future is that the ever pervasive unelected officials of governments will attempt shut down the internet.” ETC
As a prophet you rate high with me, Martin. I trust the second segment of your prophecy that: “We won’t tolerate it and nor will your children.” carries equal weight with the first segment, because the web must be truly galling to those who feel a mission to rule and see this loophole in control. I fear they will be harshly dedicated in their attempts to close it.
Graeme Rodaughan (14:47:57) : “Melbourne’s dams are at 34%. Which is very low, and lower than the same time last year.”
There is another take on this, Graeme; that in fact the Thompson, presently showing 20% full, is a wildcard in that the water from it is used for many and varied reasons that do not actually relate to “Melbourne’s water supply”. By adding the Thompson in to get the per cent full number, those who would cast fear amongst us have an added spook.
Our Melbourne water supply is down; but I do not think it as far down as government would prefer us to think.
The cities of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney are now developing massively costly desalination plants as a result of a collapse in river flows.
The desalination plant will be just like every socialist attempt at modernity – a costly flop! That is, if it ever gets off the ground and built in these days of economic difficulties and a bankrupt state government!
Which rivers are collapsing in the Metropolitan area?
I heard an interview a few months back with the NSW Environment minister. She said the Nepean had had only a splash of water over the past few years! In reality it was nearly flooding!
The Hawkesbury River, that the Nepean runs into, is tapped by the towns on its banks (North Richmond, Richmond, Windsor etc) for their water supply (and believe it or not the river is used at an effluent remover from these towns. Pity Brooklyn at the mouth :-))
And BTW when Sydney water restrictions were in place a couple of years ago people in the Hawkesbury were being hassled by the yellow vehicle water restriction police for using so-called water that had to be conserved!
In the past 30 years the population of Sydney has almost doubled! There have been no attempts to conserve and improve the water supply since then! Why? The greenies have jumped on every proposal to build new dams etc.
Global Warming may be a fact in your backyard, I don’t know because I don’t keep the statistics for your area but I do for the Hawkesbury. This year to-date (30th Dec 08) we have these figures
Mean Max 1928-2007 23.9C 2008 22.8C down 1.1C
Mean Min 1928-2007 11C 2008 10.3C down .7C
Rainfall Mean 1881-2007 798.3mm 2008 800mm up 1.7mm
For all these year 2008 was damn close to the average. Now I asked a couple of people locally what they think of the beautiful green countryside in the Hawkesbury this summer and asked hem if it was :-
a) Normal
b) Natural
c) Ideal
After we discussed their answer it was agreed that there were only two correct out of the three ie it was b) natural and c) ideal.
Why?
Because a) normally the Hawkesbury at this time of the year and for many years previously has been a brown, hot and humid place to live.
Temperatures fluctuate even in localised areas of the Hawkesbury it is called the local climate and is occasionally dealt severe blows by the weather conditions we experience.
Anthony, this is a great blog. Thank You.
BTW I have looked at the lon/lat Google map for Richmond RAAF base where the BOM stats are recorded. This RAAF base is not a busy place, I may have heard a couple of Hercules take off and land in the past weeks or so. The planes in the Google image are not parked there all the time so the location of the weather recording equipment may be quite good IMHO 🙂
Ken (20:38:21) :
Reminds me of the first year I moved to Leadville, Co in the early 70’s!
J. Peden (20:16:37) :
‘70,000 ppm is the point at which CO2 seems to possibly start bothering people – and at about 150,000 ppm most people would probably be in some stage of “CO2 narcosis”.’
Wouldn’t that only hold true if the atmosphere contain less than 18% of oxygen?
As ever, you can say a lot of things with statistics, and not all of them are true. It’s easy to get carried away, and especially to confuse weather with climate. They’re not the same thing.
This year has been the coolest year this century, but that statement hides the fact that 2008 was the ninth warmest year since 1880.
Here’s a scientific explanation of what is happening, and why it’s incorrect to interpret an end to global warming, however appealing that may seem. Quite the converse.
Meanwhile, next year seems unlikely to break any records, either. But we can can still expect to see 2009 as one of the five warmest years on record.
Happy New Year from a chilly, but still warming, London.
Thank you very much for correcting my typo on “1880”.
Apologies, too, since that comment somehow came through from the wrong blog. The correct site address should be http://roadsofstone.com
The roadsofstone.com address is for my geology-related site, rather than the more personal one, and so it’s more relevant if you have time to correct it. But it’s no big deal.
Thanks again and Happy New Year.
I love u eart, I love u human, I love u Gods………
Thanks for the good info. I hope people get out of the habit of listening to the environmental prophets of doom.
Roads (04:18:34) :
Here’s a scientific explanation of what is happening, and why it’s…..
That is a true statement if you exclude “scientific”.
Percy Drebell – It is the writers (perhaps the sub-editors rather than the named people) at the Daily Telegraph, not Phil Jones, who think that an increase in temperature of 0.21C is equal to an increase of 32.8F. While we can all make mistakes surely nobody with the any knowledge of science would make that particular error.
The correct quote from Jones is at the Met Office site and only uses Celsius. I guess that it is Telegraph policy always to provide Fahrenheit equivalents when temperatures are given in Celsius – unfortunately somebody does not know how to do that when dealing with changes in temperature.
“J. Peden (20:16:37) :
‘70,000 ppm is the point at which CO2 seems to possibly start bothering people – and at about 150,000 ppm most people would probably be in some stage of “CO2 narcosis”.’”
Info at http://www.inspect-ny.com/hazmat/CO2gashaz.htm suggests your numbers are a bit high, although they confused me by stating that at lower levels we may be seeing effects of a reduction in the relative amount of oxygen rather than direct toxicity of CO2.
10,000 PPM …some may feel drowsy.
20,000 PPM:
before most people are aware of its presence.
Over that, may cause a feeling of heaviness in the chest and/or more frequent and deeper respirations.
At that level for several hours, minimal “acidosis” (an acid condition of the blood) may occur but more frequently is absent.
30,000 PPM Breathing rate doubles
50,000 PPM Breathing rate at 4 times.
Above that it is directly toxic.
Talk about jumping the gun huh!?
>I enjoy your posts. They’re like eating candy, they’re so much fun:
Smokey,
Do you have a point? The locks were installed to stop salt water intrusion into the lower lakes which was an escalating problem in droughts due to water diversions across the Murray Darling System. With record low inflow and record high temperatures in the current drought these lochs are now functioning as dykes.
Do you have evidence that it hasn’t been the hottest drought with the lowest inflows, or that rainfall in Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra and Melbourne was not below average tin 2008? Do you have evidence that Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide are not planning and building desalination plants, or that Perth has not got one already running?
Being a “sceptic” does not mean pretending to be right all the time and disputing FACTS just because they are inconvenient to your faith.
I’d rather see a scientific explanation on why we think there is anything out of the ordinary happening at all, why we think it’s warmer now than any other integlacial or other times during this integlacial.
david,
You claimed that the lower reaches of the Murray River [ie, the river nearest the ocean] flowed below sea level, which prompted me to investigate.
‘Evidence’ is unnecessary for two reasons:
First, the burden of proof for the AGW/CO2 hypothesis is on those who believe that AGW is credible. It is up to the believers in AGW to provide the proof; it is not the duty of mainstream climatologists to prove that the climate is well within its normal and natural historical parameters.
And second, you’re talking about the weather, not the climate. I hope you understand the difference. [And regarding your ‘hottest’ droughts, they are not hot or cold. The polar regions are among the driest places on Earth.]
Droughts come and go, and their cycles have nothing to do with human activity. Furthermore, the current drought isn’t that severe by historical standards. The problem is more one of increasing population.
Australian droughts did not begin when humans arrived on the scene:
See, david, droughts happen despite human activity, not because of it [with the caveat that some activity can slightly alter the local weather, as has happened with Arizona’s CAP, and with the UHI effect].
Your turn, david. Make the next on a little more challenging, please.
David,
Oh yeah the heat in Australia is really bad. Please see this story from WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/29/christy-satellite-data-shows-earths-climate-is-changing-unevenly/
If you’ll notice, much of Australia has NOT changed in the last thirty years. The parts that have heated up have been rising at the rate of between .1 and .3C per decade.
Please…
0.1 to 0.3C/decade = 1 to 3C per century. The surface climate of Australia has warmed 1C in 50-100 years http://www.bom.gov.au/web01/ncc/www/cli_chg/trendmap/tmean/0112/aus/1910/latest.gif. Each 1C increase has been observed to result in a 15% decline in runoff.
If the weather in Australia has resulted in a temporary one degree C rise, then another location on the globe has witnessed a one degree C fall [on average].
The Earth’s average temperature is pretty much the same as it was thirty years ago.
Selecting one specific location in order to buttress the claim of AGW conflates weather with non-existent ‘global warming,’ which is occurring only in the minds of AGW believers.
Are you really trusting BOM numbers?
Why does everyone swallow everything that politicians and journalists tell us? When have they ever told us the truth? Why don’t people use their own brains and the internet to query and search to make up their own minds? Are they so ill-educated that they know nothing of history and the climate of the planet? I am appalled that friends of mine, who I thought were intelligent, thinking adults, accept this idiotic story without ever asking any questions at all and treat me as if I am the enemy because I tell them it stinks!
old construction worker:
Wouldn’t that [certain CO2 effects] only hold true if the atmosphere contain less than 18% of oxygen?
Garaka:
your numbers are a bit high
In short, “no”, though my 150,000ppm CO2 figure was intentionally hyperbolic – and not to discount your points!
Rough figures and certainly willing to stand correction:
At 18% atmospheric O2, inspired air would eventually have a pO2 of about 84 [vs a normal pO2 of about 100]: 760-47upper airway water vapor pressure = 713; 713 x .18 = 128 pO2; 128-44normal body pCO2 = 84. 84 is roughly about what would result from a 128pO2 when finally confronted with a 44pCO2 in the lungs’ alveoli.
But at, say, body pCO2 = 80 = 11.4% = 114,000ppm, the resulting pO2 of blood going to the tissues via arteries would be about pO2=44. “Arterial” pO2 = 44, while indicating something is wrong somewhere, is itself enough to at least sustain life and not decrease mental alertness, that is, if pCO2 is not up to around 60-80 where CO2 “narcosis” starts to result directly from the CO2 concentration itself.
But the “60-80” pCO2 range I’m giving for narcosis is only a ballpark figure, since in real life many not “normal” things happen. For example, I’ve seen true lab values from living patients which were supposedly totally impossible or at least utterly incompatible with the person’s clinical state.
I was mainly attempting to isolate the direct effect of certain concentrations of CO2 within the body from everything else to show that it itself is not really much of a “toxin” or a “pollutant”, in comparison to the “dire” consequences to life alleged from a 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration.
.01% = 100ppm, .1% = 1000ppm, 1% = 10,000ppm, 10% = 100,000ppm
450ppm = .045%
So an in-body partial pressure of pCO2 = 80 -> 80/713 = 11.4% = 114000ppm, and will itself most probably produce “narcosis”, meaning decreased level of mental alertness – that is, some degree of “coma”.
But .045% atmospheric CO2 is a far cry from the 11.4% needed to really significantly affect the human body.
A pCO2 of 80 will also produce “acidosis”, but the acidosis will become “compensated” – decreased by kidney bicarbonate retention and buffering – over time so that its effect itself is usually not life-threatening, unless the pCO2 of 80 is imposed suddenly. And even then the danger depends upon how the pCO2 = 80 is imposed.
A pCO2 of 80 itself will also decrease the body’s oxygen concentration to about a pO2 = 60 – down from a normal of ~ 100 – but this is not life threatening, due to the dissociation characteristics of the oxyhemoglobin molecule, so that at a pO2 = 60, hemoglobin is still carrying ~90% of its total O2 carrying capacity and can easily deliver adequate O2 to the tissues, including the brain. So, other things being equal, there will be no decreased mental alertness at pO2 = 60.
Even at pO2 = 40, hemoglobin is still carrying about 67% of its O2 as oxyhemoglobin, which it picked up while transiting the lungs’ alveoli, and which it can deliver to tissues depending upon their pO2’s.
Vanessa:
I am appalled that friends of mine, who I thought were intelligent, thinking adults, accept this idiotic story without ever asking any questions at all and treat me as if I am the enemy because I tell them it stinks!
Long story short, they ain’t your friends and they ain’t intelligent.
Vanessa,
Welcome to truth… it has never been popular, and it never will be… Get used to it.
Mike
because I tell them it stinks!
How about telling them something else, “Vanessa”?