Last updated at 7:21 PM on 13th October 2009
In the freezing foothills of Montana, a distinctly bitter blast of revolution hangs in the air.
And while the residents of the icy city of Missoula can stave off the -10C chill with thermals and fires, there may be no easy remedy for the wintry snap’s repercussions.
The temperature has shattered a 36-year record. Further into the heartlands of America, the city of Billings registered -12C on Sunday, breaking the 1959 barrier of -5C.
Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.
Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.
But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics.
According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998.
If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931.
Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment.
Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon – global cooling.
The evidence for both remains inconclusive, which is unlikely to help the legions of world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new climate change deal.
There is no doubt the amount of man-made carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be responsible for heating up the planet, has increased phenomenally over the last 100 years.
For the final few decades of the 20th century and as the atmosphere’s composition changed, scientists recorded the planet was warming rapidly and made a positive correlation between the two.
But then something went wrong. Rather then continuing to soar, the Earth’s temperature appeared to stabilise, smashing all conventional predictions.
The development seemed to support the view of climate change cynics who claimed global warming was simply a natural cycle and not caused by man.
Some doubters believe that the increase was actually down to the amount of energy from the Sun, which provides 98 per cent of the Earth’s warmth.
Sun or sea? The importance of the ocean’s cooling and warming cycles are now under serious consideration as a key factor in global temperatures
Previously, the fluctuating amount of radiation given out by the sun was thought to play a large role in the climate.
But Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, who was part of the team to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, studied solar output – the heat leaving the sun’s surface – and cosmic ray intensity over the last 40 years, and compared those figures with global average surface temperature.
He told the BBC: ‘Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity.’
Scientists have intensified the search for alternative explanations
Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University believes the key to the connumdrum may be the temperature of the world’s seas.
Figures show the Pacific Ocean has been cooling over the last few years, and Easterbrook’s research shows a correlation between this and global temperatures.
He says the oceans have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically, known as Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
And after a 30-year heating cycle in the 1980s and 1990s, pushing temperatures above average, we are now moving into a cooler period.
Professor Easterbrook said: ‘In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
‘The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.’
In Alberta, Canada (above), temperatures dropped to -16C on Monday, breaking the day’s previous record, from 1928, by about three degrees
His figures show that the global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.
Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), stressed the impact of the ocean currents in the North Atlantic – a phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation.
He believes we may be in a period of cooling – but that it will be temporary before global warming reasserts itself.
He said the NAO may have been responsible for some of the rapid rise in temperatures of the last three decades.
‘But how much? The jury is still out,’ he said.
So is the sun really going down on global warming?
The Met Office is not convinced.
They incorporate solar and oceanic cycles into their models, and they say that – even if there are periods of slower warming, or temporary cooling, the long-term trend in global temperatures is still on the up.
h/t to a jones
Read the article at the Daily Mail here
Now it is pretty hard to underestimate the intelligence of large parts of the media but just lets suppose that a few of the more intelligent members of that media settle down at night or after work to browse through some climate blogs.
After all, they are having this climate stuff thrust in front of them in a mind numbing truckloads of press releases from innumerable quangos, do gooder outfits, power hungry elitist and enviro organisations, government departments of every color and stripe all trying to carry on their nasty little internecine turf wars amongst themselves and curry favour with who ever is the top chicken at the moment.
So a tiny proportion of the more thinking members of the media might just like to check for themselves whether a lot of these claims of global catastrophes in the making actually carry any weight so they just quietly do a bit of personal internet browsing on climate change / global warming.
And lo! They find that there is a whole subculture [ like WUWT ] out there populated by some pretty smart people and even some big names in science are in there, who are openly skeptical, sometimes disparaging and often just plain derisive of the claims of the innumerable climate change disaster press releases that these media types see pass across their desks every day.
Press releases that parrot the endlessly and now the increasingly boring theme that imminent climate change/ global warming disasters are about to engulf all of mankind and damage and destroy ocean life and will be disaster for most living things and this will all happen by [ insert appropriate year, month, date, minute! ]
That sort of claim will make any good media person start to snort with derision sooner or later.
And strangely some of those skeptics on those blog sites seem to have some pretty good reasons, even if the media person doesn’t really understand what they are on about, to back up their claims that global warming and climate change from man made influences is a non event.
And the browser of the climate change blog sites carefully mentions in passing while gossiping around the coffee pot or water cooler that something he came across last night while looking through the internet did not seem to back up a lot of those claims in those press releases today.
And surprise, surprise, somebody else pipes up that, yes, he saw that too and wondered about the claims of a lot of that way out stuff from that enviro mob.
And somebody else says, who is this turkey that reckons the polar bears will all fall of their icebergs and drown tomorrow?
Never heard of him before.
From there it is a short step to some arguments in the newsroom and soon a feeling that there just may be a bit more to this story than we in the news room have been told.
And then the competition starts to find variations on the climate change story and some serious digging gets underway and editors start getting just a touch toey in case they are left out on a limb if this story just happens to be much bigger than they thought and they might just get caught backing the wrong horse.
And then the very careful, have it both ways, ass covering terminology raising, just raising the possibility that maybe all is not what it seems on the climate change front.
From there, hang on for the ride!
The media, despite what we may all think. is after all, populated by ordinary, very fallible and often ornery human beings, just like the rest of us!
philincalifornia (20:50:45) :
Straying slightly off topic here, can any of you Brits tell me if the BBC is a propaganda outlet for champagne socialism, or is it a lap dog for whoever is in power? Also, will Cameron be able to replace the individuals responsible for their idiotic AGW position over the past few years? Does the BBC report to the government?
When Greg Dyke became Director General he said that he learnt that the BBC is “only partially independent of Government.”
But in every area that they can control, this government has systematically got rid of anyone who knew what they were talking about (usually through generous early retirement packages), and replaced them with those who will say what they want to have said.
Fiddling the figures is their other ploy. This is a national joke/scandal. eg. When the number of serious road injuries was not reducing, they changed the definition of ‘serious’ to fix the problem; only trouble was they fiddled the police figures, but forgot to fiddle the hospital figures. There was an embarrasing discrepancy.
As for ‘Chlorophyll Dave.’ Look who bankrolls the Tory party: the likes of Zac Goldsmith, editor/owner of the (loss making) Ecologist magazine.
James F. Evans (22:32:00) :
“Compare the The Daily Mail article with the BBC article; the two articles are very similar in tone, style and even cite identical sources.
So, I’d say it’s a “press release” by the BBC.”
OR … a press release from person or persons unknown, that was sent to both organizations, and perhaps others?
I agree with you, that anything that influences public opinion towards rationality is good.
But I am also wondering if this is somebody hedging their bets, prior to the Copenhagen meeting.
“The Met Office is not convinced.
They incorporate solar and oceanic cycles into their models, and they say that – even if there are periods of slower warming, or temporary cooling, the long-term trend in global temperatures is still on the up.”
As a non-scientist, I wonder how this could be falsified except by waiting for several decades?
Temperature fell more than 10C in Southern Europe in 1-2 days.
Need to rewrite this as “The 19th century pattern of global cooling, which we saw again between 1949 and 1979, has reasserted itself after a temporary warming excursion brought about by excessive aerosol and particulates control regulations. We will now continue with the previously experienced long downward descent into the next Ice Age. If you wish to cease evolving, don’t forget to turn out the lights on western civilization on your way out the door.”
“But Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, who was part of the team to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, studied solar output – the heat leaving the sun’s surface – and cosmic ray intensity over the last 40 years, and compared those figures with global average surface temperature.
He told the BBC: ‘Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity.’”
You’d think a guy working at this level would understand the basics of physics! Solar activity was notched up significantly over the course of the 20th then levelled off at the higher levels. This doesn’t mean the heating is instantaneous! Just as if you turn up the heat under a pot of water, its temperature will continue to rise until an equilibrium is reached! We are now starting to see the reverse as the heat has been turned down and things are beginning to cool. This is evident in the drop in ocean heat content – that is not caused by ocean cycles!
“He [Piers Foster] told the BBC: ‘Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity.’”
Leaving out the cosmic ray hypothesis, it fascinates me how “climate scientists”, whilst paying lip service to the idea of a chaotic non linear system, seem totally clueless about how a chaotic system behaves.
If a system is described as chaotic, it means it cannot maintain a steady state even when driven by a constant force. A pot of water on the stove overall is not chaotic (although the behaviour of particles within it are) and so the temperature of the pot reaches a steady state temperature, unless the heat source is altered or the insulation changed, in which case it equilibriates at a different temperature. A chaotic climate system such as our earth, can never equilibriate at any given temperature even when all external forcings are held constant. It simply oscillates around great attractors, moving from one state to another. Each attractor, to some extent, represents an overshoot in one direction or another.
If we adopt this way of seeing our climate, then we will never find this missing forcing because none exists and none is called for. Therefore, the argument that warming must be caused by manmade greenhouse gases BECAUSE no other forcing can account for it, is a false argument.
The article reads, “Figures show the Pacific Ocean has been cooling over the last few years, and Easterbrook’s research shows a correlation between this and global temperatures.”
Pacific Ocean SST anomalies have taken a recent upswing, pretty much eliminating any thought that it’s been cooling:
http://i34.tinypic.com/t7fono.png
And if we’re talking about the heating and cooling of the Pacific Ocean, it has not been cooling for the past few years. Pacific Ocean OHC looks like it’s been rising to me:
http://i33.tinypic.com/33ljnzn.png
The PDO cannot, in and of itself, impact Global Temperatures. The PDO reflects a pattern of SST anomalies of the North Pacific, North of 20N. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon – global cooling.”
See, this is what I hate about this whole situation. It is impossible to have a cooling trend last long enough to dispel the world of this global warming alarmism, without ginning up global COOLING alarmism. Oh, and you can bet dollars to donuts that someone is going to come up with a way to blame the cooling on mankind.
And speaking of trends and their lengths, the REALLY Long-Term trend is one of warming. As the sun burns brighter and hotter over its 10-15-billion year lifespan, temperatures on Earth will slowly increase. About a billion years from now, even the “ice ages” will be far too hot for humans to live here. But don’t tell the global warming alarmists about this. They’ll build it up into another major threat, and somehow, again, blame it on mankind.
Stargazer … I think you are right on the mark … our understanding of earth’s climate and what drives it is weak at best. For all we know we could be slipping into another ice age … that would make an unfortunate mockery of many people.
>>So I am wondering where Mr or Ms Reporter got the story from?
>>It reads like a well-informed and well-balanced press release.
>>But released by whom, and why?
And rather similar to the BBC report.
Yes, I wonder where this is coming from?
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“Previously, the fluctuating amount of radiation given out by the sun was thought to play a large role in the climate.
But Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, who was part of the team to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, studied solar output – the heat leaving the sun’s surface – and cosmic ray intensity over the last 40 years, and compared those figures with global average surface temperature.
He told the BBC: ‘Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity.”
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-178
“In 2007, Ulysses made its third rapid scan of the solar wind and magnetic field from the sun’s south to north pole. When the results were compared with observations from the previous solar cycle, the strength of the solar wind pressure and the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind were found to have decreased by 20 percent. The field strength near the spacecraft has decreased by 36 percent.”
If any, what affect does the suns and the earths magnetic field have on the climate?
If any, what affect may Slar Flares have on the climate?
If any, what affect do Coronal Mass Ejections have on the climate?
Perhaps none Dr Piers Forster, but denying the posibility without an openminded investigation is not good science.
There are those who believe the moon also has an influence on the weather.
https://www.predictweather.co.nz/#/home/
Perhaps there is an influence on the climate as well????????????
Hey! What’s with the mongrels comment?
‘Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.’
I’m not sure how you define ‘earliest snowfall’ here. There was a snowstorm in the middle of July 1981 with about 30cm down to the valleys overnight. I was there on a language exchange, so I am a reliable witness!!
If you’re saying ‘snow which may remain through the winter’, then that may be true. I don’t know.
But I’d be careful about the definition. Although I agree that this is very early, most unusual and predicted to bring further snow at the weekend after some cold days and nights in between.
philincalifornia (20:50:45) :
“Straying slightly off topic here, can any of you Brits tell me if the BBC is a propaganda outlet for champagne socialism, or is it a lap dog for whoever is in power? Also, will Cameron be able to replace the individuals responsible for their idiotic AGW position over the past few years? Does the BBC report to the government? ”
The BBC is a biased organisation. It is always involved in some sort of campaign or another, and will pander to any activist. Its coverage of AGW has never been impartial, and once David Attenborough became convinced that AGW was real, he has degraded the quality of his wildlife programs so much, that in many years time, you won’t be able to view them because the claims therin will be laughable.
As for David Cameron (some of us refer to him as BlairLite). This is the chap who rides a bike to Parliament to cut down on his ommissions, but behind him, a chauffeur drives his Jaguar containing his briefcase. In the old days we called this hypocrisy, today it is all about image.
With politicians like this, what are we to do? Soon our power stations will be shutting down through age, and after the intervention of people like Hansen, we are not replacing them, except with windmills. Last winter a windmill broke, during a high pressure cold snap, windmill stationary, in freezing fog, ice build up, off balance snap… blade fell off obvious- doh! What did we get in the MSM – must have been a UFO.
It would be funny if it were not so serious, and I for one would like some quality scientists get their collective backsides off the fence, be brave for once, go to the POTUS, and the Prime Minister, to tell them the consequences of the idiocy that is going on around us. Make no mistake about it, our entire way of life in the west will be destroyed without a reliable and continuous supply of electricity. Take a look at the ice graphs on WUWT. The iceing of the arctic has started earlier in the last 2 years, and already it is cold in UK – very cold. This is not rocket science, just obvious. I deduce that winter this year will be 4 to 6 weeks longer than last. Wake Up England. Wake Up USA.
>>BBC left=of-center?
>>As a life long listener and sometime viewer of the BBC output
>>I would have to disagree with this statement.
Nonsense. The BBC is so left-wing and AGW it is off the chart.
It not only reports anything and everything to do with AGW climate change and all Green issues, it actively campaigns for them.
With the Heathrow airport protest, the BBC advertised the protest well in advance (what other protests or campaigns get BBC advertising?), gave it good coverage, and when not enough protestors arrived it advertised for more. “Not very many protesters have arrived as yet, but we are hoping for many more to join us soon” etc: etc: This great newsworthy event was, of course, about 50 dread-locked hippies in tents (bussed in by the BBC?), camping by the airport.
Regards any political issues, the BBC is also very left wing – denigrating any organisation or party that happens to be anti-Europe, anti-immigration or anti-multiculturalism. There is nothing fair or balanced about their reporting.
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>>“Compare the The Daily Mail article with the BBC article;
>> the two articles are very similar in tone, style and even
>>cite identical sources.
Viscount Monkton could be a contender here. His Science and Public Policy Institute is still quite influential.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
When the government wanted to put Gores’ ‘Inconvenient Truth’ into every UK school, a ‘private court challenge’ stopped them. I did wonder at the time who had the money and influence for that sort of challenge. Guess who – Viscount Monkton and his SPPI.
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‘Straying slightly off topic here, can any of you Brits tell me if the BBC is a propaganda outlet for champagne socialism, or is it a lap dog for whoever is in power? Also, will Cameron be able to replace the individuals responsible for their idiotic AGW position over the past few years? Does the BBC report to the government?’
1. The BBC has a Board of Governors, who oversee activities on behalf of the Government. Each year the BBC gains revenue due to UK citizens paying a ‘license fee’, as well as international revenues gained from selling programming in the commercial world. The Government and the BBC have a horse-trading session every few years to determine what the BBC must do in order to get what license fee.
2. All politicians think the BBC supports the other lot. It is duty bound to be impartial. Right now the Political Editor, Nick Robinson, is a well known Tory although his reporting is, in my judgement, accurate and fair. It’s just a fact that the Tories are doing rather well and the Labour party very badly, something he is duty bound to report. The fact that he comes across as enjoying himself doing this is probably that he’s just a happy chappie. Boris Johnson, the Tory Mayor of London, went on the soap opera Eastenders recently, presumably a bung to stop him beating up on the BBC, which he tends to do with any sort of encouragement. He’d get rid of it and let Murdoch rule supreme if he thought the British people would wash it. They won’t!
3. As far as AGW is concerned, the BBC followed the party line of the Government, the LibDems and some Conservatives. In other words they were following establishment lines and the lines of huge numbers of brainwashed children who are, believe you me, educated to believe that Carbon Dioxide is a poison. Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1980s, wrote a very reasoned book called ‘A cool look at global warming’, which remains a very fair analysis of the uncertainties faced by politicians in making decisions in the field, but pointing out, at a time of AGW hysteria, that not all folks thought that way. His view was that humans should evolve with climate, not try and control it.
4. The BBC has plenty of MI5 and MI6 moles in it, which is the UK equivalents of the FBI and CIA. This was shared by John Simpson, Foreign Affairs Editor and long-term BBC heavyweight in one of his books, who presumably knows who quite a few of them are!! This is not unique – it will undoubtedly also be true of the Daily Telegraph, one of the leading right wing newspapers in the UK!
5. The BBC is not liked by Americans as it refuses to bow down before Right Wing American Presidents. It is not in its charter to do so and nor do the British People expect it to. We view Fox News with similar levels of scorn…..
6. Mr Cameron cannot pick staff, however he will be consulted on the appointment of Governors, whose overall composition must remain neutral in party political terms. Governors are responsible for overseeing the appointment of key executives who in turn run the organisation. So no, Mr Cameron can’t turn the BBC into Goebbels’ propaganda machine. Even if you Americans want him to.
Re:philincalifornia (20:50:45)
Straying slightly off topic here, can any of you Brits tell me if the BBC is a propaganda outlet for champagne socialism, or is it a lap dog for whoever is in power?
—
It can be. Former BBC head, Greg Dyke was mentioned. He lost his job for challenging the government over WMD and the BBC’s independence.
It is supposed to be independent and impartial, but is dependent on UK government for funding and all senior appointment, ie Director General and Trust members. There have been quite a few articles in the UK regarding bias, but generally I think it’s a ‘natural’ bias. Media seems to attract liberal leaners.
Bigger problem is general challenges facing journalism, and that’s a global problem. Dead tree press and TV’s revenues are falling, budgets are being slashed, jobs are being cut and pressure piled on journalists left standing. So less money to do quality reporting, investigation or basic fact checking. Plus in the UK (and elsewhere) a lot of news is outsourced, so stories are plucked off the wires, given a light edit and published as ‘news’. So we get press releases passed off as news like the infamous NE Passage story.
So far, the warmists have exploited this effect very well, eg it’s the reason a PR company created Real Climate, to spread the correct news and interpretation, and created the current appearance of consenus. Any counters get slammed as oil-funded propaganda by people that don’t understand the irony regarding who’s paying for warmist press releases.
Nick Reynolds wrote a good book explaining the reality of what passes for news-
http://www.amazon.com/Flat-Earth-News-Award-Winning-Distortion/dp/0099512688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255524853&sr=8-1
which is depressing reading. Fortunately, we’ve got sites like this one to provide a counterbalance.
Of course they aren’t. They are loving their big budget Bertha of a new computer and all of the grant money they are getting to keep it running!
Reality check: Global warming “resquiescat in pace” R.I.P.
In great need of fossil fuels/nuke power, forget about windmills.
Bye, bye, Gorie.. your time is over.
I wonder why the people that complain that a news article seems to be be biased against AGW, and request their source (and proof), don’t request the source (and proof) of articles made saying runaway AGW is worse than we thought?
““even if there are periods of slower warming, or temporary cooling, the long-term trend in global temperatures is still on the up.”
Here is where I really get ticked when it comes to this issue. The Warmers always go back and drag up their cherry picked starting point to make the above statement, with no acknowledgement that the direction may have changed.
And then, there is this issue of solar TSI. I’ve seen the graph, and so have all of you. The TSI was higher throughout the entire 20th century than it was through out the entire 19th century. I’ve still yet to see any recent numbers on the TSI for 2008-2009, but, if I was a betting man, using the past as precedent, if the TSI sinks to 19th century levels and stays there for the next ten years, I would bet that the temp would follow, returning to 19th century levels as well. [in about ten years .. I think that is what Judith Lean published as being the lag time between solar influence and global temp.]
I love it. Climate scientists for years have claimed that the ONLY explanation for climate change is CO2. They said they have examined all other reasons and could not find anything which could explain climate change like the increase in CO2. So it’s not the sun, or anything else, it is CO2 only.
Now it looks like perhaps they might have been examining other explanations with a bias toward CO2. Or pehaps they did not examining anything else at all. Climate science; when will people learn that it is not a real science after all, it’s a sham. It’s more like an elaborate Ponzi scheme than a science.