Icecap Update: Please see the winter summary by Icecap Meteorologist Art Horn as published on the Energy Tribune.

Also listen to my radio interview with Mik Janocik on WlCR AM

At Weatherbell.com we try to show people the ‘why’ before the ‘what’.  My father taught me that if you are right, then you should have the reason why first, and not excuses for being wrong later. From where I stand, the reasons why we are right are clear. But the barrage of excuses coming from the other side is growing shriller with each passing day. But the idea that people spouting the CO2 idea are being driven from the field in spite of the overwhelming evidence against them is nonsense. When facts don’t matter, it’s not the facts that will force them to quit. This is well beyond science.

Any rational person can see what is going on and can say that in the least there is enough doubt to stop the madness that demonizes those that disagree. In reality, their point has been driven from the field.

What I am doing here is giving you the ‘why’ before the ‘what’. What I’m amazed at is how people can keep seeing things that are opposite of what they claimed would happen 5 years ago, simply change the terminology, and then say the things they say. That kind of mentality is one that does not accept any answer except the one they think it should be. So the fight is not on a level of a normal argument. The arguing is with people who believe they possess the “truth” and that anything short of their “truth” cannot be tolerated.

But we must smile and fight with facts.  Debunk, and try not to demean.

In any case the following link will be very helpful in trying to get my point across, and I am going to use mixing ratios to show some of this. See.

Here is why this should be simple. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So what is the source of energy to the Earth? Answer: the sun. If outgoing radiation equals incoming, then there is no trapping and all this hullabaloo is a moot point. Since that is the case, the game should be over.

However if you want to start confusing the issue, you assign major importance to very minor items, control the language, and then you can control the perception.

The fact is that the Earth has been warming since the very cold period of the 1700s (Little Ice Age). It just so happened sunspots were in the tank, and it was cold. When sunspot activity increased, the Earth responded by getting warmer. Should be simple, right? The link to the oceans in the overall rise that has occurred is obvious in the graph below (from the outstanding site: Climate4you.


Figure 1: CO2 concentration and global temperature.Enlarged

The cumulative effect of the warm AMO and PDO added heat to the atmosphere, so temps rose from the late 1970s to around 2000. After the air absorbed the heat, it leveled off, the PDO flipped, and we started trending down.

Simply using the PDO, as seen in the chart below from Wikipedia, shows an almost direct correlation:

The warm years from the late 1970s to a bit beyond 2000, the latest downturn can be seen as well. The Pacific is much larger than the Atlantic, but the Atlantic turned warm in the mid-1990s so it is still not fully onboard with the cooling. But when it does turn, chances are global temps will respond as one would expect knowing the heat capacity of the ocean is 1000 times that of the atmosphere. This chart alone should cast doubt, if not slay, the CO2 dragon being a major climate factor, if any at all. It’s simply too small to do what these people spouting this agenda-driven idea say it will.

Figure 2: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Enlarged

Again the overall rise of the past 200 years is easily explained by sunspots, which is why a lot of people are nervous about cooling. After all, if you are claiming the sun caused the warming, and you take it away, and the oceans flip to their negative phase, and a couple of volcanoes blow to boot, then there is real trouble. Hence the triple crown of cooling, which I showed on national TV 4 years ago when explaining why the cooling would commence, and by 2030 temperatures would return to levels seen in the late 1970s.

As for CO2, the rise may be due in part to a lag that FOLLOWS warming, and doesn’t cause it. Since the 1950s, the only time CO2 was correlated was when the oceans warmed. This is not brain surgery.

There is science and pseudo-science. Science comes up with an idea like the oceans are causing warming, and when they cool, the air cools. Pseudo-science says: well CO2 is adding to this, but how much? IT’S A QUESTION THAT CAN NEVER BE ANSWERED. Does the question then become: Would we already be heading into a mini ice age were it not for CO2 saving us?  How do you answer that?  Untold amounts of money are being thrown at a question that isn’t even something of consideration.

Now here is the problem. Temps have been dropping as you can see...not a lot, but some. But what should be very disturbing for planners and people looking forward is that the Relative Humidity is dropping. That means the wet bulb has dropped more than the temperatures. So far so good.

Figure 3: 300 mb (top); 600 mb (middle) 1000 mb (bottom). Enlarged” title="Enlarged">Enlarged

Why is the RH dropping? Think about it. A cooling Pacific, especially in the tropics, means less water vapor available to the system. So we get the initial temperature drop off because of the the cooling Pacific, primarily in the tropics, is no longer adding to the warmth of the air. But the RH is dropping too.

Where it’s dry, it does warm up and the large dry land areas do warm in the summer season, until such the entire earth/ocean system adjusts (the AMO flips to cold too). But the drop of RH, seen above in the chart is a big hint!

Notice how at this time, the 1000 mb is lagging. Eventually, though, the transport of moisture from the lagging low levels will cool the mid levels (increased moisture leading to temperatures falling toward the wet bulb), leading to more instability and more cloudiness. Until a balance is reached, the earths temps will cool. Perhaps faster.

A look at the skew T and the mixing ratio relationship to temperature really makes my point about why this is a distortion of temps and not warming.  By distortion I mean its obviously warmer in the northern areas, but THE COOLING IN THE TROPICAL AREAS, EVEN THOUGH MUCH SMALLER, CARRIES FAR GREATER WEIGHT TO THE WEATHER AND CLIMATE .

A way to think about it like 2 people that weigh the same, but one may have more mass in one part of the body than the other.

An example of this can be seen when one looks at what it takes to change the mixing ratio 2g/kg at 30c, vs -20C.

Look at how the mixing ratios increase dramatically with higher temps. In other words, suppose we lower the temps 1C at 30C (from Wikipedia chart).

Enlarged

Doing so, we would change the mixing ratio by about 2g/kg. Now how much of a rise at -20C would we need to offset that? At -20C the mixing ratio is about 0.7 g/kg. To move up 2g to 2.7 g/kg, we would have to raise the temp about 15C.

The changes in temperatures in the tropics have a much greater overall impact on the climate than those in the arctic. It is, if you will, easy to warm cold, dry air, but to cool warm tropical air is harder.  So if the earth’s temp is about steady, or falling off a bit as we saw in the graph above, and the arctic is still warm, the compensating drop in the tropics means more to the earths climate than the same movement of temps in the arctic It becomes a predictor of what has to happen as the PDO continues cold and the AMO turns cold.. the warmer northern polar regions will cool.  A degree is not a degree when it comes to the climate system.  A one degree movement up and down where wet bulb temperatures are 80 have far greater effects on the system than a 1 degree change where its near 0. That is the message behind the mixing ratio example above.

Now let me ask you this question, in terms of the climate system, which is far more important: the tropical oceans and the air masses around them, or what is going on in the Arctic? 

Again this is simply saying there is a natural large-scale thermostat called the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more it drives the whole climate system.

The slight cooling while RH is dropping is a sign of bigger things to come. This means the wet bulbs are falling faster than the actual temps. It is a predictor of future temperature falls (it’s worse than we thought).  For usually when the RH falls, the temperatures rise.  In this case, temps are already falling with the RH falling too!

At the very least I expect temperatures by 2030 to return to where they were in the late 1970s, which was the end of the last cold PDO phase and, by the way, the start of the satellite era: the most objective form of measurements.

Is the cooling worse than I thought? We are going to find out in the coming decades. 

The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on Carbon Capture & Sequestration, a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas”.

It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.

About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale, more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.

We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity.

Kevin Rudd wins this award for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”.

Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields

Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity

This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.

Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

UPDATE:

The increases in winter snows have been ignored but the focus shifted to ‘spring snow declines’ in the warmist reports. Well, this spring is running well above normal, just like the winter.

Snowfall data from NOAA Rutger’s Snow Lab for April is in. It ranked 9th greatest, high enough to make the cold season (November to April) average the HIGHEST in the record (back to 1966).

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ALASKA HEADED FOR AN ICE AGE

“Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again,” says this article in the Alaska Dispatch.

“While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation’s icebox is getting even icier.”

“That may not be news to Alaskans coping with the coldest winter in two decades or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth”, says author Alex DeMarban.

In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

“That’s a “large value for a decade,” the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.”

The cooling is widespread - holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It’s most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.

Enlarged

“Most noticeable was that for the first time last year, the Bering Sea ice shelf extended south nearly to the edge of the Alaska Peninsula,” said Don Hatten, the National Weather Service forecaster in King Salmon.

“Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska.”

See entire article, published on December 23, 2012

See how Fairbanks is averaging nearly 15F below normal for April.

START OF 2013 THE COLDEST IN 208 YEARS

See the snow in Spain at the end of April here.

German Herald as reported by ICEAGENOW

German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is the coldest in 208 years and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, who says it is proof that we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.”

Talking to German media, the scientist said that based on his sunspot studies, we are now on an “unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.”

Building on observations made by English astronomer Walter Maunder, Dr Abdussamatov said he had found that the Earth cools and warms in a 200-year cycles.

The last big freeze, known as the Little Ice Age, took place between 1650 and 1850 which he said coincided with Maunder’s findings that there had been no sunspots between 1645 and 1715.

“The last global decrease of temperature (the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age) was observed not only in Europe, North America and Greenland, but also in any other part of the world during the Maunder minimum of sunspot activity and of the total solar irradiance in 1645 to 1715 years,” says Abdussamatov.

People forced to leave settlements that had been inhabited for several centuries

“All channels in the Netherlands were frozen, glaciers were on the advance in Greenland and people were forced to leave their settlements, inhabited for several centuries,” Abdussamatov continues.

Humanity has always prospered during warm periods and suffered during the cold ones

“The Thames river in London and Seine in Paris were frozen over every year. Humanity has always been prospering during the warm periods and suffering during the cold ones. The climate has never been and will never be stable.”

Heavy snow and cold driving UK into triple-dip recession

Abdussamatov’s warning that cold weather would hit prosperity follows news that Britain is heading for an unprecedented triple-dip recession as economists warned that the combination of heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures might be a crucial factor in whether the economy expanded in the first three months of 2013.

Now the Russian scientist, who first made his prediction in 2005, says the new mini Ice Age will begin next year and will last for 200 years.

The Met Office has warned that temperatures will remain below average until about 20 April, not just in the UK, but in the rest of the world.

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And as Joe Bastardi of weatherbell.com reported on Cavuto today and in a post on WB:

SECOND COLDEST START TO SPRING IN US HISTORY

The only year when the spring started colder was 1975.

Courtesy Steve Goddard

Heading for the coldest spring on record????

Since the colder March/April year 1975 was warmer in May, we may be heading for the coldest spring on record given the cold May forecast.

Would you believe up to 24 inches of snow is forecast the next few days.

Th3se are picture from Scottsbluff, Nebraska TODAY, May 1, 2013.

See more stories here on the cold 2013.

Also NoTricksZone reports the spring snows also were seen in Spain and allegedly in Saudi Arabia. Don’t suppose Andrew Freeman at Climate Central has written on this.

Weatherbell Analytics on Forbes

After a slow start to severe weather season, Monday’s devastating tornado that hit Oklahoma reminds us how costly and destructive the change of seasons can be in the United States.  Following one of the coldest March/April stretches in several decades, which caught most of the energy market by surprise, April and the first half of May produced significantly fewer tornadoes than normal.  The cold air that overwhelmed the country in March and April resulted in huge natural gas withdrawals, drove prices up some 30% and served as the mitigating factor for thunderstorm development.

The March global temperature anomaly shows severe cold stretching from Alaska to Florida, as seen below.

Enlarged

As we progressed through May however, warm/moist air from the Gulf of Mexico has finally begun to surge north, creating boundaries between air masses with vastly different characteristics.  More tornadoes occur in the U.S. than any other place on earth as a result of this classic setup.

A deep low-pressure system centered over the Dakotas draped a strong cold-front through the plains pulling extremely moist and unstable air from the Gulf of Mexico.

CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy), a metric of thunderstorm potential, saw extreme values ahead of the frontal boundary especially over Oklahoma during Monday’s tornado outbreak.

Enlarged

Another main ingredient for tornadogenesis was a strong upper-level jet streak from the southwest, which meant turning winds with height or vertical shear. So far during the spring, Gulf of Mexico moisture and favorable jet stream configurations were almost entirely absent, instead replaced with a cold, persistent northwesterly flow from snowcovered Canada.

Enlarged

The result was was explosive supercell thunderstorm development, as seen in the animation below.

Damage from Monday’s severe weather outbreak is already being estimated to approach $2 billion.  With more severe weather on the way, it is inevitable that we will see more damage and life-threatening situations.  But on the heels of devastation like this week’s tornado, it is also important to remember that weather like this has always occurred and the current trend is similar to the climate cycle of the 1950s, with a cold Pacific and warm Atlantic.  However, with an expanding population and greater suburban and rural development, more people and structures are in the path of deadly storms in the US than in the past.

It is critical to always be alert to the potential of severe weather.  Businesses with enterprise alerting systems, which warn decision makers of certain weather events (ex. tornado watch or blizzard warning), can take action to protect physical assets and human life.  Alerting systems can also be used by businesses to direct operations to limit financial hardship and in some cases, garner financial profit by avoiding shutdowns or outages.

It doesn’t look like hurricane season is going to provide a respite from extreme weather.  Joe Bastardi has warned for years that we would enter a period of climactic hardship as a result of the cold PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and warm AMO (Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation). Similar to the 1950s, the United States should experience heightened risk for landfalling hurricanes and higher likelihood of summer heat/drought.  We have experienced tremendous heat and drought the last several years.  Our summer forecasts calls for the heat to be less of an issue this year, as it should be centered over the Rockies and Texas.  We expect a more normal temperature/precipitation profile for the Eastern half of the United States.  However, tropical cyclone development should be above normal this year.

We expect an above normal ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), a more meaningful measure of the total energy of tropical systems. The Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) profile is similar to 2005, which was the most active Atlantic tropical season on record.  The water temperatures in the deep tropics are substantially above normal, which should provide extra “fuel” for tropical cyclone development.  With no sign of an El Nino, there will be little in the way of upper air shear to tear apart any storms that may form.  And similar to the 1950′s, the overall climactic pattern should steer the storms towards the US coastline.  Our official forecast can be seen in the chart below.  This year’s activity will have far reaching impacts across the energy and insurance markets.

Enlarged

ICECAP NOTE: While the positive AMO (warm Atlantic) and negative PDO (cold Pacific) leads to enhanced Atlantic activty and landfall threat for the east, the cold Pacific (negative PDO) leads to more intense (E3-E5) tornadoes. Come join us at Weatherbell.com for more.

Enlarged

Icecap Note: He is not alone. Today, Senator Boxer rang the bell. Morano Statement: “U.S.  Senators Boxer and Whitehouse and other global warming activists have descended into buffoonery trying to exploit a natural disaster in Oklahoma. Have you no sense of decency, Senators? At long last, have you left no sense of decency or understanding of science?”

MA Senate wannabe Deadwood Markey and NH Senator Shaheen have been pushing the AGW green (watermelon - green on the outside red on the inside). if they get their way, energy prices will skyrocket and brownouts and blackouts will become common. And $4 gasoline and heating oil will seem like the ‘good old days’. Europe bought the enviro agenda and it almost destroyed their economy with unemployment in Spain rising to 27% and tens of thousands dying all across Europe from 5 brutally cold winters while energy prices rose to levels that made it impossible for them to pay for food and energy. All for the idea that CO2 is behind every extreme weather event even though temperatures have not risen and sea level rises have slowed not accelerated. Scientists in Europe are said to be shocked or dumbfounded that the climate is not following their models. The enviros are in retreat in Europe but on the rise in the US where the demagogue party assumes you have not heard about the failures in Europe or that the Obama green agenda has been a dismal failure at job creation despite the huge subsidies (just as we saw in Europe) has adopted the idea to blame severe weather - explainable entirely by natural cycles - on ‘carbon pollution’.

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse From Rhode Island Provides Erroneous Information To American Public in Global Warming Rant
Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat

First, I’m sure I speak for everyone at WUWT (and Icecap) when I say that our hearts go out to all the families in Oklahoma affected by the weather tragedy there today.

In the video here US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse states that:

“When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas.”

Read more: Daily Caller

If Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did more reading and less ranting, he might know that Continental US Temperature Lower Troposphere (TLT) - 1979 to Present;

Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) Click to view at source

is currently below average.

US Strong to Violent Tornadoes (EF3-EF5) 1950 to 2012;

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).  Click to view at source

are below average. US Inflation Adjusted Annual Tornado Trend and Percentile Ranks;

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center. Click to view at source

are currently below average. US Tornadoes Daily Count and Running Annual Total;

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center. Click to view at source

are currently well below average.

US Extremes in Landfalling Tropical Systems 1910 to Present; Annual;

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Click to view at source

are currently below average.

This US Acres Per Wildfire and the Number of Wildfires Per Year graph;

shows that the number of wildfires have decreased, while the acres per fire have increased.

This is an important distinction as the associated article elaborates:

This graph shows the inverse relationship between numbers and sizes of US wildfires over time. Note the greater number and smaller sizes of fires between the creation of Wilderness in 1964 and the beginning of the modern wildfire era in 1987 and 1988 (with Silver Complex and Yellowstone fires of those years), as compared with the smaller number and greater size of recent fires. One factor may be the shift in USFS policy from rapid suppression to “let it burn,” which has allowed for numerous smaller fires previously extinguished individually to coalesce into larger fires and singular complexes. Evergreen

For reference;

“Forest managers agree that the current fire risk is primarily a combination of two factors “ higher-than-average temperatures and a profusion of fuel, the product of nearly a century of fire suppression policies.”

“Recognizing widespread overgrowth in American forests, in the late 1970s the Forest Service began reintroducing policies of prescribed burning and allowed many smaller, natural fires to burn out on their own, provided they didn’t threaten lives or property. The decision this summer to attack all fires, while not a direct reversal of this policy, does represent a departure from that practice of natural restoration, said Jennifer Jones, a public affairs specialist with the Forest Service. Scientific America

The shift in thinking was formalized in a 1995 statement of federal fire policy, and strengthened in a 2001 revision. The policy recognizes that fire is “an essential ecological process,” and that decades of trying to keep fires from burning have led, ironically, to “larger and more severe” conflagrations because of the buildup of underbrush and other fuel. USA Today

As such, US Forest Fire data is biased by “nearly a century of fire suppression policies” and “the shift in USFS policy from rapid suppression to ‘let it burn,’”, which begin “in the late 1970s”, “was formalized in a 1995 statement of federal fire policy, and strengthened in a 2001 revision.” Furthermore, given that continental US Temperatures are currently below average, it is absurd to blame to recent forest fire activity on Global Warming.

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse used the tragic weather events in Oklahoma to spout erroneous alarmist Global Warming rhetoric. Mr Sheldon, less ranting, more reading…

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Anthony: Unfortunately, there is shameful precedence for this sort of opportunistic political rhetoric, WUWT readers may recall when the Center for American progress blamed southern conservatives voting record for tornadoes:

Never let a good crisis go to waste: tornado deaths blamed on lawmakers opposed to climate legislation

NOAA practices advocacy science with major errors / lies about CO2 in official release

Carbon Dioxide at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory reaches new milestone: Tops 400 ppm

May 10, 2013

Contact: John Ewald, 240-429-6127

On May 9, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since measurements began in 1958. Independent measurements made by both NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been approaching this level during the past week. It marks an important milestone because Mauna Loa, as the oldest continuous carbon dioxide (CO2) measurement station in the world, is the primary global benchmark site for monitoring the increase of this potent heat trapping gas.nonsense

Carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and other human activities is the most significant greenhouse gas (GHG) contributing to climate change. Its concentration has increased every year since scientists started making measurements on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano more than five decades ago. The rate of increase has accelerated since the measurements started, from about 0.7 ppm per year in the late 1950s to 2.1 ppm per year during the last 10 years.

“That increase is not a surprise to scientists,” said NOAA senior scientist Pieter Tans, with the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “The evidence is conclusive that the strong growth of global CO2 emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas is driving the acceleration.”

Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, global average CO2 was about 280 ppm. During the last 800,000 years, CO2 fluctuated between about 180 ppm during ice ages and 280 ppm during interglacial warm periods. Today’s rate of increase is more than 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.

NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Thursday, levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since measurements began in 1958. Pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels were 280 parts per million.

It was researcher Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, who began measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in 1958, initiating now what is known as the “Keeling Curve.” His son, Ralph Keeling, also a geochemist at Scripps, has continued the Scripps measurement record since his father’s death in 2005.

“There’s no stopping CO2 from reaching 400 ppm,” said Ralph Keeling. “That’s now a done deal. But what happens from here on still matters to climate, and it’s still under our control. It mainly comes down to how much we continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy.”

NOAA scientists with the Global Monitoring Division have made around-the-clock measurements there since 1974. Having two programs independently measure the greenhouse gas provides confidence that the measurements are correct.

Moreover, similar increases of CO2 are seen all over the world by many international scientists. NOAA, for example, which runs a global, cooperative air sampling network, reported last year that all Arctic sites in its network reached 400 ppm for the first time. These high values were a prelude to what is now being observed at Mauna Loa, a site in the subtropics, this year. Sites in the Southern Hemisphere will follow during the next few years. The increase in the Northern Hemisphere is always a little ahead of the Southern Hemisphere because most of the emissions driving the CO2 increase take place in the north.

Once emitted, CO2 added to the atmosphere and oceans remains for thousands of years.more nonsense. Tom Segalstad has shown many papers found the lifetime is just 5-7 years. Thus, climate changes forced by CO2 depend primarily on cumulative emissions, making it progressively more and more difficult to avoid further substantial climate change.  Direct chemical measurements (90,000) in Europe showed CO2 was higher in the 1940s and 1800s than it is currently.

See compilation of replies in Climate Depot Special Report “CO2 nears 400ppm. Relax it is not global warming end times but only a big yawn”

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In Defense of Carbon Dioxide

The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature.

By HARRISON H. SCHMITT AND WILLIAM HAPPER

Of all of the world’s chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been-and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a “pollutant” in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants.

Using energy from sunlight - together with the catalytic action of an ancient enzyme called rubisco, the most abundant protein on earth - plants convert carbon dioxide from the air into carbohydrates and other useful molecules. Rubisco catalyzes the attachment of a carbon-dioxide molecule to another five-carbon molecule to make two three-carbon molecules, which are subsequently converted into carbohydrates. (Since the useful product from the carbon dioxide capture consists of three-carbon molecules, plants that use this simple process are called C3 plants.) C3 plants, such as wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and many forage crops, evolved when there was much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today. So these agricultural staples are actually undernourished in carbon dioxide relative to their original design.

Corbis

At the current low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, rubisco in C3 plants can be fooled into substituting oxygen molecules for carbon-dioxide molecules. But this substitution reduces the efficiency of photosynthesis, especially at high temperatures. To get around the problem, a small number of plants have evolved a way to enrich the carbon-dioxide concentration around the rubisco enzyme, and to suppress the oxygen concentration. Called C4 plants because they utilize a molecule with four carbons, plants that use this evolutionary trick include sugar cane, corn and other tropical plants.

Although C4 plants evolved to cope with low levels of carbon dioxide, the workaround comes at a price, since it takes additional chemical energy. With high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, C4 plants are not as productive as C3 plants, which do not have the overhead costs of the carbon-dioxide enrichment system.

That’s hardly all that goes into making the case for the benefits of carbon dioxide. Right now, at our current low levels of carbon dioxide, plants are paying a heavy price in water usage. Whether plants are C3 or C4, the way they get carbon dioxide from the air is the same: The plant leaves have little holes, or stomata, through which carbon dioxide molecules can diffuse into the moist interior for use in the plant’s photosynthetic cycles.

The density of water molecules within the leaf is typically 60 times greater than the density of carbon dioxide in the air, and the diffusion rate of the water molecule is greater than that of the carbon dioxide molecule.

So depending on the relative humidity and temperature, 100 or more water molecules diffuse out of the leaf for every molecule of carbon dioxide that diffuses in. And not every carbon dioxide molecule that diffuses into a leaf gets incorporated into a carbohydrate. As a result, plants require many hundreds of grams of water to produce one gram of plant biomass, largely carbohydrate.

Driven by the need to conserve water, plants produce fewer stomata openings in their leaves when there is more carbon dioxide in the air. This decreases the amount of water that the plant is forced to transpire and allows the plant to withstand dry conditions better.

Crop yields in recent dry years were less affected by drought than crops of the dust bowl droughts of the 1930s, when there was less carbon dioxide. Nowadays, in an age of rising population and scarcities of food and water in some regions, it’s a wonder that humanitarians aren’t clamoring for more atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead, some are denouncing it.

We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

A version of this appeared in the WSJ. Mr. Schmitt, an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico. Mr. Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and a former director of the office of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.

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The once great New York Times in denial on Benghazi is also carrying the water for the liar enviros and psuedo scientists with Justin Gillis’s continuing series of liar stories on CO2 impact here. Justin claims CO2 is the highest it has even been in the history of the earth. As you can see numerous studies have shown we are near the LOWEST levels in history. We need to push for higher CO2 to maximize crop production and drought resistance, and minimize water needs.

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It also shows no convincing evidence of being associated with temperature changes.

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Please bring back Andy Revkin, Gillis is clueless and NYT go back to covering ‘all the news thats fit to print’ accurately and in an unbiased way or you deserve to fail.  And NOAA get back to covering weather and stop your advocacy science. Management nonsense is why employees on the front line gave management in NWS such low grades in survey.

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of (wouldn’t you know it?) California, six other congresswomen (D-CA/CA/USVI/NY/MN/IL), and five congressmen (D-MN/GA/AZ/CA/NY) have introduced House Congressional Resolution 36, calling America to fight “climate change,” aka global warming (of which there’s been none for over 16 years now), to prevent women from becoming prostitutes.

No, your eyes didn’t fool you. The resolution claims that poor women are “vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.” “Sex work” and “transactional sex” are euphemisms for prostitution.

Ignore in passing that it’s not “sex work” and “transactional sex” per se but the associated risks they bring that bother the resolution’s sponsors. I guess the prostitution would be okay with them if it just weren’t for those nasty side effects.

The irony of the resolution comes from a fact hidden in plain sight: According to the “the world’s most authoritative scientific effort to understand and address changes in the Earth’s climate,” the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), poverty will shrink more with global warming than without it, not just for the wealthy West but also for the developing Rest.

Why? Because IPCC’s warming scenarios are based on its economic forecasts. More economic growth, according to its models, causes more warming; less growth, less warming.

And we’re not talking about tiny changes at the margin - lifting people from abject poverty to slightly more tolerable poverty. We’re talking about lifting people from grinding, life-shortening poverty into a standard of living that meets or surpasses that of today’s industrialized countries.

Surprised? Not if you’ve been following IPCC Working Group III, which studies warming’s impacts, or the Stern Report, a British government effort to forecast economic impact of warming through this century. (Neither IPCC nor Stern, by the way, is known for understating the risks from global warming.)

Let’s put some hard numbers to the discussion.

IPCC offers various scenarios for warming, each based on a scenario for economic development. Under its coolest “B1,” according to which the world keeps global warming down to 3.8F by 2100 after subtracting losses caused by the warming, developing nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) per capita rises from $900 in 1990 to $39,400 in 2100. Under its warmest scenario, “A1F1,” with high economic growth depending on lots of fossil fuel use and consequently lots of carbon dioxide emissions, the world warms by 7.2F by 2100 and developing nations’ GDP per capita rises, after subtracting for losses from warming, to $61,500, which is about one-fourth higher than America’s today.

Economist Indur Goklany, who has been studying the economic effects of both global warming and climate policy for over two decades, lays out all the likely scenarios in “Is Climate Change the Number One Threat to Humanity?” in the peer-reviewed journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. One figure, reproduced here, sums up the story.

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“Net GDP per capita, 1990-2200, after accounting for the upper bound estimates of losses due to global warming for four major IPCC emission and climate scenarios. For 2100 and 2200, the scenarios are arranged from the warmest (A1FI) on the left to the coolest (B1) on the right. The average global temperature increase from 1990 to 2085 for the scenarios are as follows: 4 C for AIFI, 3.3 C for A2, 2.4 C for B2, and 2.1 C for B1. For context, in 2006, GDP per capita for industrialized countries was $19,300; the United States, $30,100; and developing countries, $1,500.” Source: Goklany, “Is Climate Change the Number One Threat to Humanity?” pre-publication draft.

So, if poverty drives women into prostitution, and if Congresswoman Lee and her colleagues don’t want that result, they should submit an entirely different resolution: “Protect the Poor, Prevent Prostitution: Don’t Fight Global Warming!”

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is founder and national spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

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See Art Horn and Joe D’Aleo of Icecap in this Hudson Cable show discuss how the real motivations behind the climate change hoax.

“Excessive energy costs have helped obliterate the state’s manufacturing base” Wall Street Journal, 03/ 29/ 2013

Coal based energy is a key factor in global socio-economic development, transforming agrarian societies to modern industrial ones. This societal transformation, driven by the accumulation of income and wealth, eliminates many contagious diseases, reduces child mortality, and lengthens adult life expectancy. Throughout the world, rapid emergence from poverty has proceeded as countries develop electricity networks based on coal. These systems are capable of achieving massive economies of scale that provide large amounts of power at low cost, stimulating technological change, spurring productivity growth and raising living standards. It is no coincidence that coal provides over 40% of the world’s electricity. Consumers prefer low-cost and reliable power. Proponents of so-called “carbon-free” energy (e.g. wind) argue that their low market shares are the result of market distortions, such as the absence of a market price for environmental externalities. The fundamental reason for these low market shares, however, is that such intermittent sources are considerably more expensive than coal. To promote inherently uncompetitive technologies, some governments have resorted to subsidies and production mandates. These policies not only increase government spending but also impose hidden efficiency costs on the economy that silently erode our standard of living. Consumers end up paying more for energy and getting less. Spending that once went for education and housing is diverted to energy expenditures. Manufacturers also pay more for energy and they pass these higher costs on to consumers who end up paying even more for goods and services. Consumers are then forced to cut back again. The result is a compounding of efficiency losses throughout the entire economy.

California is the poster child of how an extreme anti-coal agenda is adverse to human health and welfare. California has disdained the nation’s most affordable and reliable source of electric power in favor of unreliable and expensive non-dispatchable sources such as wind and solar. Not surprisingly, California’s baseload electricity supply is now at risk and costs are dramatically on the rise. The urban legend that California’s energy policies are somehow superior to those of other states is being unmasked as the social and economic predicament of the state’s families and businesses becomes ever more apparent.

The Rhetoric

The Reality of California

“Energy policies in the state of California are very advanced compared to the rest of the nation,” California Council on Science and Technology, 2012

THE FACTS

Electric rates 40% above the national average

12 million people eligible for LIHEAP

700,000 manufacturing jobs lost since 2000

Budget deficit of $25 billion in 2011

Negative net worth of $127 billion in 2013

More children in poverty than Nebraska has people


Electricity Prices: California vs. the U.S. (Enlarged)

“...(an) important factor that is pushing manufacturing jobs out of California is the rising cost of electricity, caused by the states ill-conceived energy policies… What is already unreasonable will only become more so with the new mandates” POWER Magazine

(Enlarged)

Based on a set of speculative computer models and despite rising electricity prices, one of the nation’s highest unemployment levels and severe questions about grid reliability, California has nevertheless has proceeded with AB 32, the so-called “Global Warming Solutions Act”. This cap and trade program seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of this decade. that is in just seven years. While the impact of this excessive legislation has yet to be determined, the California Manufacturing and Technology Association has estimated that AB 32 will cost consumers $135 billion by 2020 almost two-and-a-half times the annual funds spent on K12 education. AB 32 will lower the states 2020 GSP by $153 billion a loss of 5.6%. California will have 262,000 fewer jobs in 2020 because of AB 32 and energy expenses for the average family will increase $2,500 per year. AB 32 will reduce state and local tax revenues by over $7.4 billion annually an amount exceeding 10 years of funding for the Children’s Medical Services Program. The energy facts of life are catching up to the “Golden State”.

California’s Electricity Rates in Perspective (Enlarged)

“CPUC has approved nearly every renewable contract filed by the utilities, even when they rate poorly on least-cost, best-fit criteria.” California Division of Ratepayer Advocates

“The “Rate Impact Bomb” is lingering on the horizon”
CPUC Commissioner Michel Florio

California’s Electricity Rates and Manufacturing Jobs (Enlarged)

“Manufacturing jobs provide benefits to workers with higher overall compensation than other sectors, and to the economy through innovation that boosts our nation’s standard of living,” U.S. Department of Commerce, 2012

In a departure from historical reality, California’s political agenda views energy as a social problem. Policymakers are implementing an energy plan that is adverse to human health and welfare. Reliance on untested, unverified and idealized computer models is steadily destroying the future of the state raising rates, driving industry away, increasing unemployment, putting more people into poverty and placing both energy security and reliability at risk. After the deregulation debacle in the mid-90s they should know better. That earlier academic exercise cost consumers hundreds of billions of dollars, destroyed jobs and ousted Gov. Gray Davis through voter recall. In a critique of the state’s latest experimental foray into energy, California’s Independent Oversight Agency the “Little Hoover Commission” concluded the state has not done a legitimate cost-benefit analysis and warned of a “rate impact bomb” by 2016. That’s when consumers will have to start fully paying for the massive array of costly renewable projects the CPUC so cavalierly approved the last few years. And this time, reifying the results of esoteric computerized scenarios is taking an even greater human toll. The impacts of the drastically escalating rates associated with these ill conceived anti-coal policies are real, not hypothetical abstractions. Over 1.7 million Californians are unemployed. And the problem is not going away California is regarded as the worst state in the Union for business a reputation that may haunt for decades:

Best and Worst States for Business 2012

“California’s climate change regulations will discourage energy intensive industries from locating in the state, and existing industry will have an incentive to relocate outside of the state” Boston Consulting Group, 6/21/2012

Californians will pay a heavy price for ignoring our most abundant and affordable energy resource. Clean coal technologies work and are continually evolving. In many other states, and in other parts of the world, emissions have steadily declined, while electricity from coal generation has significantly increased. Rhetoric and political posturing do not produce one kWh of electricity. Clean coal does and California should recognize this fact before it’s too late.

“...millions of Californians could soon experience power outages. As the state derives more of its electricity from renewables, it needs more “peak” gas-fired plants that can ramp up to meet demand when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing”. The Wall Street Journal, 03/29/2013

The Competitive Enterprise Institute announces a Congressional Staff and Media Briefing on EPA’s FOIA Scandals: “Richard Windsor,” Gina McCarthy, and the Abuse of Power with Chris Horner, Author of The Liberal War on Transparency and Senior Fellow, CEI, Monday, May 20th, 3 to 4 PM EDT Senate Dirksen Office Building

EPA’s FOIA Scandals:"Richard Windsor,” Gina McCarthy, and the Abuse of Power

The Obama Administration and in particular the Environmental Protection Agency have stonewalled a number of Freedom of Information Act requests by the Competitive Enterprise Institute that seek to make public more details in the form of public records of the Administration’s global warming agenda, war on coal, carbon tax plans, and other anti-affordable energy policies.  In the past two years, CEI has filed a number of lawsuits to force the Obama Administration to comply with the law.  Chris Horner will discuss what these FOIAs have discovered so far, including:

1. The use for official business by Administrator Lisa Jackson of an alias e-mail account under the name of “Richard Windsor”

2. The use for official business of private e-mail accounts by high EPA officials, prompting resignations

3. Ongoing attempts to conceal information by heavily redacting documents for impermissible reasons under FOIA, seeking to delay and deny access to information

4. Revelation of uncomfortably close relationships with officers of environmental pressure groups, and admitted efforts to conceal this

5. FOIA fee waiver requests are regularly denied to groups deemed unfriendly to this agenda, particularly CEI (which denials are overturned on appeal with equal regularity), but routinely granted to environmental pressure groups

6. The involvement of Gina McCarthy, Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation for the past four years and nominated to be EPA Administrator, in the Richard Windsor scandal and other attempts to evade federal openness and transparency laws and policies.

Chris Horner

Christopher C. Horner, J.D., is a counsel and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  He is also director of litigation at the American Tradition Institute.  Mr. Horner is the author of four books, most recently The Liberal War on Transparency, published in 2012 by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon and Shuster.  He has filed many Freedom of Information Act requests to a number of federal agencies during the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama administrations. 

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by Anthony Watts
From the WSJ (h/t to Chris Horner)

The Washington Examiner reported Tuesday that the EPA under Ms. Jackson has a history of favoring groups that share the agency’s political agenda. “Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived,” according to the report.

Government agencies like the EPA typically waive so-called Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request fees for groups disseminating information for public benefit, but it’s up to the agency to decide whether a fee-waiver is justified. At the EPA, fees were waived for liberal environmental groups like Greenpeace and EarthJustice almost always. Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, “had its requests denied 93 percent of the time. One request was denied because CEI failed to express its intent to disseminate the information to the general public. The rest were denied because the agency said CEI ‘failed to demonstrate that the release of the information requested significantly increases the public understanding of government operations or activities.’”

This is important because the White House and Democrats have increasingly used regulators at the EPA to advance a green agenda that they can’t get through Congress.

Full story here

Meanwhile Pierre Gosselin writes that in Germany, something similar is going on:

If we ever needed help, it’s now…

We have a powerful Ministry now directing its full might and resources against people only because they have a different opinion. Chilling to say the least.

Climate Highlights - April

The April average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 49.7F, which was 1.4F below the 20th century average. April 2013 ranked as the 23rd coolest such month on record and marked the coolest April since 1997 when the monthly average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 48.0F.

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The central U.S. was much cooler than average during April. North Dakota had its coldest April on record with a statewide average temperature of 31.0F, 9.9F below average. Six additional states - South Dakota,Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Wisconsin - each had a top ten cold April. Below-average temperatures were also present for the Northern and Central Rockies, the Southern Plains, and the Mississippi River Valley.

Near and above-average temperatures were present along the U.S. East Coast and in parts of the West.California had its 12th warmest April on record with a statewide temperature 3.7F above average.

The April average precipitation for the contiguous U.S. was 2.90 inches, 0.47 inch above average, and tied with 1953 as the 19th wettest April on record.

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The Northwest, Midwest, and the Southeast were wetter than average. Iowa and Michigan both had their wettest April on record. The Iowa statewide average precipitation total of 6.71 inches was 3.76 inches above average; the Michigan precipitation total of 5.97 inches was 3.29 inches above average. Additionally,Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin each had one of the ten wettest Aprils on record.

The wet conditions in the central U.S. resulted in several rivers in Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan reaching record high levels, with widespread flooding observed. The Mississippi River at St. Louis also reached flood stage after dropping to near-record low levels at the beginning of the year.

Below-average precipitation was observed in the Southwest and Northwest. New Mexico had its 12th driest April, while Connecticut and Rhode Island had their sixth and 11th driest April, respectively.

Alaska was much cooler than average during April, with a statewide average temperature 5.8F below the 1971-2000 average. This was the 7th coldest April in the 96-year period of record for the state, and the coldest April since 1985. The average temperature in Fairbanks was 14.5F below normal and the coldest April on record for the city.

According to the April 30 U.S. Drought Monitor report, 46.9 percent of the contiguous U.S. was experiencing moderate-to-exceptional drought, smaller than the 51.9 percent at the beginning of the month. Drought conditions continued to improve across the Southeast, Midwest, and along the northern and eastern periphery of the core drought areas of the Great Plains. Drought conditions worsened for parts of the Southwest, and drought continued for much of the Great Plains and Mountain West.

Several storms impacted the U.S. bringing record-breaking, late-season snowfall to central United States. According to data from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, the April snow cover extent for the contiguous U.S. was approximately 480,000 square miles, 209,000 square miles above the 1981-2010 average and the 5thlargest April snow cover extent in the 47-year period of record. However, dismal snowpack continued in parts of the West, with only 18 percent of normal snowpack reported in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

On a local basis, over three times as many record cold highs and lows occurred than record warm highs and lows. Approximately 3,430 record low temperatures and about 4,050 record cool daily high temperatureswere tied or broken. In comparison, approximately 690 record warm daily high temperature records and 1,570 record warm daily low temperatures were tied or broken.

March/April was the coldest since 1996 and 33rd coldest out of 119 years.

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Climate Highlights - year-to-date (January - April)

The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. for the year-to-date period was 39.3°F, which was near the long-term average. Near to below-average temperatures were present from the Rockies, through the Plains and into the Ohio Valley. Near to above-average temperatures were observed in the West and the Northeast.

The nationally-averaged precipitation total for the year-to-date period was 8.94 inches, 0.13 inch below average.

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Wetter-than-average conditions stretched from the Great Lakes, along the Mississippi River Valley, and into the Southeast. Michigan and Wisconsin each had their wettest January-April, with precipitation totals 5.26 inches and 3.62 inches above average, respectively.  Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois also had a top ten wettest year-to-date period.

Much of the western and northeastern U.S. was drier than average during January-April. In the West,California had its driest year-to-date with a statewide precipitation total of 3.59 inches, 9.49 inches below average. Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho each had one of their ten driest year-to-date periods. In the Northeast,Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont also had a top ten dry January-April.

The year-to-date USCEI was near-average. Despite the near-average USCEI, the extremes in 1-day precipitation totals and the component that examines the spatial extent of drought were both much above average.

Guest post by Caleb Shaw

I am having trouble getting to the bottom of a serious issue, (or a serious issue for a bird lover like myself.) It may well be that wind turbines are killing endangered birds, and may lead to the extinction of the California Condor and the Whooping Crane.

Because wind turbines involve a great deal of capital, (not merely the big-bucks of fat-cats, but also and especially the political capital surrounding the save-the-world idea of Global Warming,) the bullying of media-warping power politics seems to be involved.  You can’t get a straight answer to a simple question.

All I want to know is whether or not the population of whooping crane has fallen by over a hundred, since wind turbines were erected in their flyways.

I think it may well have happened, but because the government would get bad press if such was “a fact,” the facts get muddled. The government is on record as saying wind turbines are good, and has invested huge amounts of taxpayer’s money in erecting them.  They will downplay bad news.  One way to downplay is to change the way of counting whooping cranes. For 61 years an aerial count was used. Now a new “hierarchical distance sampling” is used, and gives a number with an absurd degree of uncertainty. .

What is the degree of uncertainty?  “Plus or minus 61 whooping cranes.” That could be as much as a half of the total population. It is a failure to give an honest questioner an honest answer.

261 would not be good news, but would indicate the population was at least holding steady, however, if you subtract 61 from the positive direction and go 61 in the other direction, you have 139 whooping cranes, which is an environmental disaster.

It also would be a political inconvenience, and a business inconvenience to all fat cats who have invested huge amounts of money into the enormous, towering, and very ugly turbines.

However I always thought true environmentalists didn’t care about what was inconvenient for politicians, and inconvenient for fat cats, and instead cared about what was inconvenient for whooping cranes.

When you can’t even get the data that matters, not even from the Environmental Protection Agency, it starts to look like environmentalists have been bought out by, and have sold out to, fat cats and politicians. I always thought that was the one thing that environmentalists never, ever would do.

I figured environmentalists needed to be warned.  Therefore I left the following comment, (actually a sort of letter-to-the-editor,) at the environmentalist website Wind Turbine Syndrome, on the post.

“I have linked to your story in a post at my obscure website. I have also left links to your post when I comment at other websites.

The problem is that environmentalists have overused the sympathy of the public, because some less-than-altruistic environmentalists have raised the alarm, but have done so for reasons that involve political and even business interests.  By allowing such people to infiltrate our ranks we have dug a grave for ourselves, because we are now like the little boy who cried wolf.  When we raise the alarm, the public rolls their eyes and doesn’t listen.

An example of such a false alarm may well be the “snail darter,” which is a small fish which lives in a California delta.  Because California’s climate has included both copious rainfalls and withering droughts, the delta has varied hugely, and the little fish has evolved to cope with tremendous variations. However the environmentalists involved made it sound like the slightest bit of irrigation in America’s richest farmland, (which has the longest growing season,) could wipe the obscure minnow out, by reducing the water in the delta.

While there are good arguments on both sides, the uproar made environmentalists look bad for two reasons. First, it made them look like they cared more for a few hundred minnows than feeding hundreds of thousands of Americans.  Second, it made them look like liars, when it turned out that particular minnow had survived horrific historic droughts when the delta was practically dry. Once environmentalists have been made to look bad in this manner, the public is slow to forgive the stain on their reputation.

The whooping crane population was down to around 21 in 1941.  It was only due to the work of altruistic environmentalists, who worked hand in hand with Washington DC, that the population bounced back to over 200.  It is a triumph, and shows environmentalism at its best.

We need to return to that goodness, but we cannot do so with people who abuse environmentalism in our ranks.  We are like a beautiful garden, but our ranks contain some rank weeds.

Some of our members are merely young, and need the guidance of older and wiser members. However others are rather obviously more interested in money, quick profits, and power politics than anything that has to do with keeping nature in balance, and beautiful creatures alive.

None of us much likes to be disagreeable, but we had better disagree with these people, who are actually fakes and phonies.  In the most polite manner possible, we need to bring up the truth and demand the facts, and confront them.  They are corrupting a beautiful thing, and if we don’t stand up for what environmentalism stands for, we are standing by as a sewer pipe pollutes a beautiful river, but in this case the river is environmentalism itself.

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Shepherd or Shoot Goats in the Name of Climate Change

By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times.

O’Hare airport will finally get its goats. The Department of Aviation of the City of Chicago has awarded a contract to a private firm to provide 25 goats to munch vegetation at the city’s airport. These “green lawn mowers” will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions to sustain the planet.

Last fall, when the project was bid, Amy Malick, head of sustainability at the Department of Aviation, commented on the planned use of goats in hard-to-mow areas, “They may have steep slopes, very hard to get to with heavy machinery, and those machines also emit pollution. They’re burning fossil fuel. So as a sustainability initiative we’re looking to bring in animals that do not have emissions associated with them, at least to the same extent that heavy machinery would.”

A shepherd will herd the goats across 120 acres at four different sites on airport property. The 25 fuzzy critters are expected to clear vegetation each day from a square at least sixteen feet on a side.

Chicago is not the first city to employ animals to reduce airport vegetation. Sheep are used at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and goats are used at San Francisco International. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport deployed goats as early as 2008, but stopped because “it was not cost effective.” How can a guy with a lawn mower be as cost effective as a herd of goats?

A single one-way Boeing 747 flight from Chicago to London emits about 200 tons of carbon dioxide, or about 5,000 times the annual emissions from a gasoline-powered lawn mower of a homeowner. It appears that emissions savings from O’Hare goats will be relatively small. But what about methane emissions from the herd?

On the other side of the world, about 10,000 miles from Chicago, the government of Australia has a different solution for global warming. More than a million wild camels, called “feral” camels, roam the outback of Australia. They munch up the foliage and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from both the nose end and the tail end. Each camel produces more than one ton of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. Feral goats are also part of this severe climate problem.

But the enlightened Australian government passed the Carbon Farming Initiative Act in December of 2011. The act calls for “The reduction of methane emissions through the management, in a humane manner, of feral goats, feral deer, feral pigs, or feral camels.” “Management” companies are now flying over the outback, shooting goats and camels from helicopters, and earning carbon credits. Maybe the Aussies should use goats instead of lawn mowers at airports?

So goats are both grazed and shot to reduce those evil carbon dioxide emissions. It’s all part of this mad, mad, mad world of Climatism.

Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism:  Mankind and Climate Change Mania.

Without much fanfare, the Department of Energy (DOE) recently updated the list of loan guarantee projects on its website. Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches. But the data are nonetheless revealing: for the over $26 billion spent since 2009, DOE Section 1703 and 1705 loan guarantees have created only 2,298 permanent jobs for a cost of over $11.45 million per job.

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The tragic deaths in Oklahoma will be used be Global Warming attacks as prima facie evidence that Global Warming is real and the government needs to do something about it. That will mean, of course, a loss of freedoms and more taxes to pay.

History and facts can be irritating to people who have an agenda to feed. These agenda pushers feed on ignorance. The less people know, the easier they are to control.
In 1975, an article was published that blamed Global Cooling for weird and destructive weather.

“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

“The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April [1974], in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

“To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century
of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

The last paragraph of the article is predictable. The government was called on to do something. One proposal was to melt the Arctic ice cap:

“Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”

From the April 28, 1975 issue of NEWSWEEK magazine.

The great dream of progressive politicians is to find a problem whose prescribed solution appears to require unending increases in taxation or political control preferably both with production of no measurable improvement. Ideally, the situation would be one in which the perception is opposite to reality i.e., where the “solution” actually worsens the true situation.

Sounds crazy? Who would do anything this nutty? Answer: we would. And to “fix” what problem? Answer: Global Warming. Since the 1990s the Greenies have been pounding the government-control/taxation drum for lessening carbon-dioxide emissions, on the premise that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” that increases the earth’s surface-temperature by trapping the heat of the sun.

For a time, in the 1990s, warming appeared to be happening. Former Vice-president Al Gore built an entire new career (and a considerable fortune) on the theory that CO2 causes warming. He preached a message of advancing doom, claiming it was “settled science."” He chose data selectively and omitted important facts like the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, when temperatures went up several degrees. He also neglected to mention the Little Ice Age (AD 1450-1850), when glaciers advanced, canals froze, and global temperatures plunged. Dr. Gore’s famous “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures vs. time ignores these salient periods, which were caused by entirely natural events beyond man’s control.
Although one would scarcely realize it from current news reports, the fact is that the climate has not warmed over the past 15 years. Instead, global cooling appears to be the new climate-dynamic.

To illustrate this, I present as evidence a chronology of world-wide climate-events over the past year, compiled by Geoffrey Pohanka. (http://isthereglobalcooling.com/ ) Mr. Pohanka argues that we are now in a period of global cooling, but I’ll let the reader draw his own conclusions from the data presented.

Feb. 2012: Europe and the Far East in the deep freeze. Coldest temperatures in Germany in 26 years; over 300 die from hypothermia and storm-caused accidents. Biggest Rome snowstorm since 1986. Three weeks of record cold in Europe: temperatures 25 C below normal; coldest February in 26 years; one of ten coldest in last 150 years. China temperatures hit -50 C. Coldest winter in memory freezes 40% of Mongolian livestock. Temperatures down to -50 C.

March 2012:  Warm first quarter in eastern USA, but Oregon and Washington have all-time record snowfalls. Second largest ice extent on record in Bering Sea. Record cold in Tasmania, Australia. Huge snowfall in China kills 90,000 livestock and impacts 25,000 people.

April 2012: Sydney, Australia has coldest April 10th in 80 years.

May 2012: UK has coldest May in 200 years.

June 2012: Sweden has one of its coldest Junes since records began in 1789. Rare cold in New Zealand. Argentina frosts lead to agriculture crisis. Seattle has third coldest June in history.

July 2012: Emergency in Argentina due to cold; a dozen people freeze to death in Chile. Tasmania has record low temperatures.

August 2012: South Africa has snow in all 9 provinces for first time in recorded history.

September 2012: Extent of Antarctic sea ice is the largest ever recorded on Sept 12.

October 2012: Record cold grips part of Australia; earliest snow in a century. Surprise snow hits central Germany. Heavy snow catches Muscovites unprepared. For only the second time in recorded history all Austrian provinces have snow in October.

November 2012: Early cold snap kills 14 in Poland. Hurricane Sandy causes record snowfall in Appalachians. Three tourists die from cold on Great Wall of China due to early snow. Winter hits early on three continents. Record snow around USA, including Northeast. Globe seized by record cold: UK faces coldest winter in 100 years; Arctic sees record refreeze; snow in New Zealand.

December 2012: UK had coldest autumn since 1993. European deep-freeze kills hundreds. Record snow in Norway. Severe cooling grips Eastern Europe: over 600 die from cold; dozens die in Poland cold-snap. State of emergency declared in Ukraine due to huge snows; 37 dead in 24 hours. Russia faces strongest winter in decades: -50 C temperatures; people freezing to death; over 125 dead so far; snow up to 16 feet deep. Motorists near Moscow trapped for days on highway during snowstorm, backup extends 125 miles. State of emergency declared in Siberia; -60 F temperatures. Massive cold front grips Asia; northern India cold wave kills 25. USA has the most snow cover in ten years. Record snow in Minneapolis. December 2012 had largest Northern Hemisphere snow cover ever recorded.

January 2013: Asia gripped with record cold: hundreds dead; Bangladesh has coldest temperatures since 1960s. Russia buried under snow. Over 300 die from brutal cold in Eastern Europe. 29 die from cold in Mexico. Bermuda has record daily low temperature.

February 2013: New England snow is record. German winter temperatures are dropping at rate of 6 C per century. Alps cooling since 2000, according to peer-reviewed literature. Heaviest snowfall in a century hits Moscow. All-time low Northern Hemisphere temperature of -96 F recorded in Oymyakon, Siberia. Japan has heaviest winter snow in recorded history. Germany has darkest winter in 43 years.

March 2013: Winter 2012 to 13, November-February, ranked 4th largest snow in history; #2 for Northern hemisphere. December ‘12 had most December snow ever. Arctic sea ice largest in a decade. UK in deep freeze: deaths from cold mounting; coldest spring since 1963; UK gas rationing as shortages mount with coldest weather in 50 years. Second coldest March in USA since 1969. Calcutta has coldest day in 100 years and record low March temperatures. Berlin has coldest March in 100 years. Germany’s coldest spring on record: late March temp of -33 C is coldest March temperature in over 100 years. Climate models fail to predict brutally cold European temperatures. Thousands of animals buried alive in Ireland by snow drifts.

Never heard of most of this? If you live in the Eastern USA, where most of our news originates, that’s not surprising. It’s unlikely that most of what’s summarized above will have reached the USA’s liberal controlled mainstream media. Record-setting cold and snow do not fit the global warming storyline being peddled by liberal politicians and their media lapdogs. Thus, the average man-on-the-street will disbelieve these extreme-weather reports if he sees them. He still thinks we’re all going to roast and drown in rising oceans unless we pay all we have to the government.

The “chattering classes” in the USA express dismay over the lack of climate-interest shown by China, India and Russia. Those reports for the past year give a good indication of why they’re not down with the warming struggle: they’re freezing to death and they’re up to their hips in snow. Why would they want to cool things down any more?

Yet our own political leaders from both major parties continue to push ruinously expensive “cures” for the humanity-threatening problem of “anthropogenic warming.” Our president has already implemented his war on coal that will make the price of electricity “skyrocket” (his own term). He wants to do the same for the gasoline we need for our cars. He refuses to allow exploitation of our newly realized reserves of oil and natural gas that would give us energy security for a century or more.

All this is in the name of protecting the climate by controlling carbon-dioxide emissions. On that premise, we are pouring billions into absurd industries which will have absolutely no effect on climate, but will waste fortunes that our people need to live indeed, to survive. Much of the world already knows that the earth is cooling, not warming, but our Leader is charging ahead with plans to sacrifice our economy on the Altar of Climate. What he cannot obtain by law he will execute by executive order and Cabinet regulations.

The inmates are running the asylum here. We must stop them before we’re all broke, pedaling rickshaws, and freezing to death in the dark. Global warming is the greatest hoax in history.

The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works. Yesterday’s story means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop.  It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for environmentalists everywhere; if the EU can’t make the green agenda work, it’s unlikely that anybody else will give it a try.

The European Parliament just voted down a measure that would have attempted to revive its carbon market, likely dooming it to a slow and undignified death. This was a last-ditch effort to drive the EU’s carbon price back to a level that would incentivize green reforms. And it failed.

The EU’s carbon market was the flagship program of its recent green efforts. Ideally, it would have given companies a reason to emit less carbon. Companies that emitted less than allowed could have sold off remaining carbon credits to firms that emitted more. But the authorities gave out too many credits, and as Europe’s economy faltered the price for those credits plummeted. The vote today was meant to save the program by addressing this over-allocation, creating an artificial shortage that would drive permit prices back up, but in a time of financial crisis, the European Parliament chose industry over green ideology. The WSJ reports:

“It was a vote of reason,” said Poland’s environment minister, Marcin Korolec. Poland, one of the EU’s less-affluent members, has been outspoken in its opposition to the measure, which it said could hamper development. [...]

After the vote, the price [of carbon credits] dropped to 2.55 Euros before recovering partially to 3.2 Euros...down from nearly 30 Euros in 2008.

Without the backloading plan to increase scarcity on the emissions permit market, “the ETS will almost certainly collapse,” said Kash Burchett, a London-based analyst at consulting company IHS Energy.

The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works. Today’s story means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop.  It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for environmentalists everywhere; if the EU can’t make the green agenda work, it’s unlikely that anybody else will give it a try.

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Listen Now: Full One Hour Audio of Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano available here:

Selected Excerpts: ‘If you just start scratching the surface of this issue, not only will you not believe, but you will be angry...Warmist climate claims are ‘insulting to our intelligence. They are insulting to science’
...

‘No matter the weather, they can point to what study they need, they have covered themselves on both sides of the aisle by all of the contradictory predictions they have made. This is where it morphs into horoscope or astrology. They can credibly cite some study to support their claim. Why? Because they pretty much predicted everything and anything as some point. This is what they are calling science....If you predict everything and anything, you will have a study to back it up. That’s where the bastardization of science continues unchecked.’ (See: Unfalsifiable: More Than 30 Contradictory Pairs Of Peer-Reviewed Papers)

....

But the warmists still claim ‘it’s worse than we thought.’ But how is worse than we thought? Sea level is not accelerating, polar bears are thriving, global avg temps stalled. They will reply ‘Haven’t you heard? By 2060 they (the warmists) are now predicting x,y,z,.’ But wait a minute, that not worse than we thought. That just another scary prediction. As the real world data fails, prediction of the future get scarier and scarier. It’s almost as if they want to distract us from reality.’

...

“Regardless of environmental scare - and we are talking global cooing [of 1970s], overpopulation, species extinction, sustainable development, deforestation - they always have the same solution. You can go back and plug and play, plug in different environmental scare, but guess what, it is always the same solution. More centralized planning, more international government control, perhaps a global tax of some kinds, management of countries, violation of sovereignty. We now have German climate advisor calling for CO2 budget for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

The latest ice-core analysis from the Antarctic shows that nothing unusual in terms of melting is occurring.

In research published yesterday, a large team of scientists used a deep ice core from the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide to produce records going back some 2,000 years. Their analysis shown that recent melting in that area, which has caused a good deal of hysteria* in climate alarmist circles, is in fact normal.

“If we could look back at this region of Antarctica in the 1940s and 1830s, we would find that the regional climate would look a lot like it does today, and I think we also would find the glaciers retreating much as they are today,” comments Eric Steig, a senior earth-sciences boffin at the University of Washington and the lead author on the new research.

Ice loss in recent times from the Western Antarctic - considered to be one of the main places to worry about, if you worry about sea-level rises - may just “not be all that unusual”, according to Steig.

The problem, as with many climate change issues, is that conditions in the Western Antarctic vary so much over short time scales that it’s hard to work out if any long-term change is actually happening.

“The magnitude of unforced natural variability is very big in this area,” Steig comments.

Another major ice study recently came to similar conclusions regarding the likewise much-discussed Antarctic Peninsula: that recent melting there is not unprecedented, and indeed that various large bits of ice in that area which today are still intact probably broke off or melted at times in the pre-industrial past.

Stieg and his colleagues’ paper is published in Nature Geoscience.

Bootnote

* For instance the hippies at Greenpeace (it is compulsory to be a hippie at Greenpeace) have this to say:

“… melting of ... the Western Antarctic ice sheet could ultimately raise sea levels by anything up to 13 metres or so (43 foot) if we do not drastically curb our greenhouse gas emissions, even the small fraction of this predicted by 2100 would be an economic and humanitarian disaster…

“… London, Bangkok and New York, Shanghai and Mumbai will be among a number of cities which will eventually end up below sea level ...”

Actually though, that small fraction by 2100 is really tiny even under the standard alarmist case - which is itself looking very unlikely.

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it.

Freeman Dyson

So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him.

“I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said.

Dyson came to this country from his native England at age 23 and immediately made major breakthroughs in quantum theory. After that he worked on a nuclear-powered rocket (see video below). Then in the late 1970s, he got involved with early research on climate change at the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”

That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.

But that approach lost out to the computer-modeling approach favored by climate scientists. And that approach was flawed from the beginning, Dyson said.

“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”

A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic projections trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.

“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”

Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 - even though we humans poured record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere during that decade.

That was vindication for a man who was termed “a civil heretic” in a New York Times Magazine article on his contrarian views. Dyson embraces that label, with its implication that what he opposes is a religious movement. So does his fellow Princeton physicist and fellow skeptic, William Happer.

“There are people who just need a cause that’s bigger than themselves,” said Happer. “Then they can feel virtuous and say other people are not virtuous.”

To show how uncivil this crowd can get, Happer e-mailed me an article about an Australian professor who proposes quite seriously the death penalty for heretics such as Dyson. As did Galileo, they can get a reprieve if they recant.

I hope that guy never gets to hear Dyson’s most heretical assertion: Atmospheric CO2 may actually be improving the environment.

“It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation,” Dyson said. “About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil.”

In fact, there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO2 than the negative effects, he said. So why does the public hear only one side of this debate? Because the media do an awful job of reporting it.

“They’re absolutely lousy,” he said of American journalists. “That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed.”

I know why: They’re lazy. Instead of digging into the details, most journalists are content to repeat that mantra about “consensus” among climate scientists.

The problem, said Dyson, is that the consensus is based on those computer models. Computers are great for analyzing what happened in the past, he said, but not so good at figuring out what will happen in the future. But a lot of scientists have built their careers on them. Hence the hatred for dissenters.

“It was similar in the Soviet Union,” he said. “Who could doubt Marxist economics was the future? Everything else was in the dustbin.”

There’s a lot of room left in that bin for the ideas promulgated by people dumber than Dyson. Which is just about everyone.

ADD: This quote from the great H.L. Mencken captures perfectly the religious nature of those in the climate cult:

“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.”

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The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce
Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic
zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the
report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are
being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 90+ years ago.

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Warmist Kevin Drum on selling the global warming hoax: “...anecdotal evidence (mild winters, big hurricanes, wildfires, etc.) is probably our best bet. We should milk it for everything it’s worth” H/T Tom Nelson.

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See also Dr Craig Loehle’s analysis on WUWT Climate Change Impacts In The USA is Already [NOT] Happening.

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See the Galileo Movement here. Visit Then click on the blue text: “9.2.12 Evidence of Political Fraud - Malcolm Roberts”

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See John Coleman’s excellent video summary ”There is NO Significant Global Warming” on KUSI Coleman’s corner. No one communicates better to the public.

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See Dr. Doug Hoyt’s Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.

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From Jack Black’s Climate Change Dictionary

PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.

SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.

DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.

CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce ‘panic for profit.’

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to “Peace” in any meaningful way.

DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see “DENIER,” above.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for “DATA” by “DENIERS.’ Also skilled at affecting an aura of “Smartest Person in the Room” to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.

JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge

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Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.

NOTE: Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV.  If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.

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See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.

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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.

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900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming Alarm and here a list of 1000 stories suggesting global cooling has begun.

“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”

The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.

See still more annotated here.

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Many more papers are catalogued at Pete’s Place here.

The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.

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See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.

Also available now some items that will gore your alarmist friends (part of the proceeds go to support Icecap):

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

See sister sites:

WeatherBell Analytics here.

Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) here.

Coleman’s Corner here.

Science and Public Policy Institute here.

Intellicast Dr. Dewpoint Library here.

RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)