Above: Al’s high five on ice caps (gone in five years)
Guest post by Steven Goddard
In today’s
Guardian, Al Gore is quoted as saying:
Gore says he has also detected a shift in the view of many business leaders. “They’re seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years,” .
He also acknowledged something important about his scientific limitations :
Responding to James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, who said the European trading system for carbon was “disastrous”, Gore says: “James Lovelock has forgotten more about science than I will ever learn. “
Given that
sea ice area at the poles is right at the 30 year mean (
red line below,) one might conclude that Gore’s first comment is baseless and that his second comment about his own limited learning potential, is correct.
Dr. Vicki Pope at the UK Met Office warned about this on February 11, 2009 in an
article titled “
Stop Misleading Climate Claims“
“Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point and will disappear very quickly. The truth is that there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, the record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer sea ice increasing again over the next few years.
The
Guardian published Dr. Pope’s article, but it seems that less than five weeks later they have forgotten her warning.
If the current trend continues, we can expect to have sea ice at the poles for a very long time. When
George Will brought this subject up, he was severely criticized because polar ice on that day was below the mean by about 1%. But apparently it is OK with the press for Gore to be off the mark by 100%. It seems that there is zero accountability or accuracy required for alarmists.
BTW – Before anyone starts claiming that the steadiness of the UIUC global sea ice anomaly graph above is irrelevant or coincidental, they might want to pause for a minute and think through if that position is scientifically tenable – or even vaguely rational.
In a WUWT reader’s poll earlier this month, 91% of respondents forecast that 2009 minimum ice extent will be greater than 2008 – apparently agreeing with Dr. Pope’s comment above. Perhaps Al Gore should swap his Nobel Prize with people who have a better aptitude for learning science.
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The Nobel prize is a joke. One of the worst terrorist in the world Yassir Arafat won the Nobel Peace prize. The fact that Al Gore won the same prize just means that Al Gore is as helpful to the world as Arafat. Do I need to say any more?
Lee Kingston
Thank you for that succinct, LOGICAL post. Could not agree more.
Regardless of what direction the climate ultimately goes….we need to be sinking ALL of our efforts into preparing for the future.
As another poster has said:
“Where is the NASA that put men on the moon???”
CHRIS
Norfolk, VA
RE:
E.M.Smith (19:47:31) :
philw1776 (16:25:28) :
james griffin (12:50:36) :
CodeTech (11:35:55) :
Claude Harvey (10:30:17) :
Gentlemen:
My memory of Y2K seems to be a bit different than yours. As early as 1989 I was adding some rather convoluted programming to my date routines because no one was listening to my concerns that security checks and previous-year-to-date comparisons would crash at the end of the century. Functions like network security, product shelf-life, inventory, just-in-time delivery, raw material staging, production scheduling, order-processing, and material orders, not to mention any reporting function involving multi-year comparisons, absolutely would have failed. That they did not was a tribute to the time and effort many of us put in our products. In the 18 months prior to the millenium I worked on almost a dozen different installations with literally millions of lines of code that needed to be reviewed, reworked and tested. I never expected my truck to not work or my electricity to fail, but the companies I consulted for would have gone belly up without our Y2K efforts. Y2K may have been over-blown, but it was not a scam.
Five years from now, Al Gore will be holding up the parade.
You have to realize that he’s a politician, not a scientist.
Hansen and others have fed him a line.
Or so they might think.
This is where it gets messy. Who’s holding whose strings?
The politician usually survives the train wrecks. Al Gore has an out, his political skills.
Not so unwitting doomsayers who understood the underlying data and bought into the game. I call them fodder for the Bus.
Forget the medal, I want the million dollars. I could put it to better research than for global warming studies.
David C. Ball,
I have noticed the same trend with many actual temperature readings as much as 11 F lower than forcasted. I don’t remember forcasts being consistantly high before. They must be using a new program that has a high temperature bias.
Billboard of Al Gore and his 5 year prediction?
If it stays up for 5 years it could work. But who will remember it if it’s only up now? Who will keep track of that? Most people won’t. They will only have vague memories of it in 5 years, if anything at all.
But a billboard informing of WattsUpWithThat.com–that will have an impact NOW. And I would contribute to that.
I won’t contribute to the 5 year Al Gore idea–sorry.
If WUWT had advertisements that could pay for billboards, commercials, etc.
Just a thought.
OT: This CNN video of the British explorers that are trekking to the North Pole to measure the ice thickness just kills me.
video link
Paraphrasing:
Clearly, many that report on AGW in the MSM have absolutely no clue what it is they are talking about. This video is comical.
OK, I am getting bored by these Gore’s and similar comments that are completely detached from reality. And I suspect that most people are already getting bored by them, too.
Most people only believed the global warming alarm because of pure ignorance – they didn’t have any reason to doubt the only thing that they have heard. But because the other, proper explanation is gradually penetrating to the ears of everyone, the reasons to believe the “only answer” are going to evaporate.
2010 may already be a year when the alarmists will be returned the fringe status.
Roger, do you really believe that California’s economy could pick up by then? I sure hope it can and does, but I don’t share your optimism. I think California’s economy is basically toast for a very long time. But, on the other hand, if it does, I am sure you are correct that the AGW crowd will attempt to either take credit for it, or use the improvement to minimalize the impact of their “green” policies. I really feel for Californian’s right now. I believe they are in for a very rough road ahead.
Most of the posters here are natural scientists like myself. The discussion starts with physical data, and can get very technical. In order to understand what the real political and general academic situation consists of, however, you have to do some readings in social science. If you spend even several hours, you will discover that there are people with considerable influence who know nothing about hard science, but who do indeed understand and practice some rather abstract and strange sounding psychological concepts.
The http://green-agenda.com site has quotes that sound very odd to a normal person, for example. But it represents a certain worldview that is more extensive than you would expect, if you are a hard science type such as most of the people here.
Going further, one might read a little about the father of the ‘march through the institutions’ —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
The long marchers are doing very well, so far. One of the reasons is simple — there is little understanding of social science and psychological manipulation on the part of regular scientists such as ourselves. The marchers are unopposed.
There is a free download site,
http://www.scribd.com
that has a lot of material on psychological topics, and much else. As an example, enter the words to find an essay about the use of psychological techniques in the manipulation of public opinion. It does not take a lot of suggestible people to tip the political balance.
After some reading you will conclude that the rational side is very uninformed about the psychological and political aspects, and is not offering any ‘real’ opposition. At the public level, the intelligent commentary found here has just about zero impact. You will eventually realize that Mr. Gore and his allies know things that you do not — that is why he is powerful, and you are not.
A Dalton or Maunder minimum will be required to change the situation. For now, the long march continues to win by default.
Oops, the scribd search terms should be ‘Obama NLP’ … There are a lot of other NLP downloads available. Strange stuff, for someone such as myself, but it works at the mass level, apparently.
10,000,000. Way to go. Congratulations Anthony!
Two Words.
Vapid Apostate.
Generally I avoid the topic that is Al Gore. Generally boring and lacking in substance, he stirs up dissonant clouds of bafflegab which is frustrating in its pointlessness.
The writing is indeed on the wall. It says: AL GORE IS A WORLD CLASS IDIOT!
Hansen is now a certified radical activist, and we in the UK wish that you in the US would keep him at home!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5908377.ece
The Y2K problem was real and not remotely akin to the AGW scare: older bespoke computing systems that utilised two numerals to represent the year – that included, for example, many of those handling global financial services – would, if not fixed, have failed. A simple example: a system that treated “99” as meaning “1999” and, therefore, “00” as meaning “1900” could not have handled an interest calculation correctly. It was an absurd problem caused because a software solution that made sense in the 80s was not phased out in time by a short-sighted computer industry. What had to be done was simple enough: to identify the vast numbers of cases where the problem existed, to correct them and to test the corrections. It took a long time and was mind numbingly boring – of limited interest to computer “experts” who would far rather have been blowing up the dotcom bubble. And, in 1997, not enough people were getting on with it. Hence the so-called scare. But eventually people did listen, they did act and, by and large, the problem was averted.
One faint cause for hope is that the comments that are posted in response to AGW-related articles tend to favour the skeptics. Looking at the Guardian’s “report” on the ICCC, for example, or George Monbiot’s weekly tirade in the same paper, I would judge that the comments run about 50/50 for and against AGW. In articles written by skeptics (such as most of the posts on WUWT, or Christopher Booker’s weekly column in the UK Telegraph), the comments are almost 100% skeptical.
If nothing else, it shows that there is a healthy proportion of those that follow these issues that does not buy the alarmist propaganda. The fact that there are so many skeptics shows, in turn, that despite the almost blanket acceptance of AGW by most of the world’s media and politicians, the efforts of skeptics such as Anthony are having an effect. There is, of course, a long way to go before the alarmist train is fully derailed, but it’s worth the effort. Ultimately, the skeptics’ cause will be won when the climate refuses to warm up and none of the predictions of the alarmists come true, but the challenge facing the skeptical community now is to prevent the world’s economy from imploding before then through misguided policies designed to counter a threat that doesn’t exist.
Retired BChE (18:28:27) : said
” Al Gore’s comments about the handwriting on the wall saying that in a few years the polar ice caps will disappear reminds me of a thousand-year-old quote from Omar: “The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it”
I personally would contribute $100 to put up a billboard with Al’s photo and comment on it in some prominent place, so the public can see what he said about it five years hence!”
I have previously written that we need a web site with all these predictions-and there are many-together with a tickingclock. It would also show the predictions that didn’t come true.
I’m sure there must already be something of this nature. Anyone care to provide a link?
Tonyb
Mean while cities will be putting off purchases of items to deal with cold weather like road salt,
This is exactly what happened in London this winter. For years they were told that cold winters would disappear because of global warming. The Met Office predicted a warmer than usual winter. Alas, the winter came and it was the coldest for a long time with heavy snows. London wasn’t prepared for it at all, power failed, there wasn’t enough road salt to last a few days, police weren’t prepared to deal with accidents, the trains didn’t run on time or had to be cancelled, etc
Over one week the economy lost an estimated £17 billion.
OT but according to the Norwegian paper Aftenposten, James Hansen says (Google translated from Norwegian text)
“- I would rather see the climate talks in Copenhagen fail, than that we get a deal based on the trading of greenhouse emissions that allow continuing with coal, “says Professor James Hansen of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies to Aftenposten.no.”
Tiny URL to Google translation
http://preview.tinyurl.com/bt38tq
To me it looks like the alarmists are planning for “climate talk failures” as a back door out of the CO2 mess.
Because of all that has been written about them and thinking I would like to see what they looked like I took a punt and Googled ‘computer model’ images.
I should maybe have been a trifle more circumspect and not assume that those grandchildren of mine would not alter the access security settings on my PC.
To my surprise most of the models appeared to be overloaded with false data and were unnatural, eg lots of silicone.
Then again there were signs of warming but maybe not global.
Mods – snip if you must 🙂
GIS and HadCrut are in for Feb.
GIS at +0.41
HadCrut at 0.35 (below UAH 0.36),
All for centers are pretty much in line this month. Amazing.
Looks like GIS made an error in fudging their numbers!
I had expected 0.6something from them.
Lubos,
“2010 may already be a year when the alarmists will be returned the fringe status.”
I hope you are right because I’m also totally fed up with Gore, his face and his constant stream of flatulence.
But why do you say 2010? What dynamic do you see developing?
At the moment only 40% of Americans are sceptical.