So much fun! On the heels of this game-changing revelation in an e-mail I received under the Freedom of Information Act, lamenting that the NASA GISS data are - in the eyes of NASA GISS scientists themselves - less credible than the Climategate CRU data. As a quick reminder for those who have been away on interstellar travel for the past four months - or just relying on broadcast networks and the NYT and Washington Post for your news - that is the data which for all legal and scientific purposes does not exist (they lost it/destroyed it/dog ate it). As you’ll see, that is now of even greater significance than it was days ago.

The latest jolly has just come from taking a quick spin around Al Gore’s interwebs to see what NASA might have said about Climategate, and to review in the wake of that huge embarrassment the alarmist walk-back on the importance of CRU, which one establishment pressure group dismissed as merely “one of four organizations worldwide that have independently compiled thermometer measurements of local temperatures from around the world to reconstruct the history of average global surface temperature.” That spin from Pew is not quite accurate, but seems to have been thrown out there to stave off reality. The truth as we now know it is that NASA admits its data is not independent at all, but thoroughly dependent upon CRU’s - which, we have established, doesn’t exist. I’ll let the kids at Climate Progress do the math from there.

But better, in the wake of Climategate this post (screen shot it like I did, it won’t go un-edited for long!) we have the dangerously unhinged Team Soros crowd at Climate Progress contemporaneously shouting anything they could make up - including testimonials to NASA’s unreliable/fabricated/non-existent temperature record like “NASA’s dataset, which is superior to the Met Office/Hadley/CRU dataset.”

Chuckle. Of course it is, dear. Except that even NASA’s own activists don’t dare make that one up.

Now in the hole, CP would dig deeper: “There’s little doubt that the GISS dataset better matches reality than Hadley/ CRU dataset.” If that turned out to be true it would be for no reason other than dumb luck since, again, NASA created its global temperature data set by taking CRU claims and adding NCDC’s for the U.S. As NASA began mewling after getting caught in 2007 sexing up U.S. temperatures, well, the U.S. is only 2 percent of the earth’s surface. Meaning NASA’s data set is 98 percent made-up, even if you ignore NCDC’s myriad problems of using temps from thermometers moved to airport runways, next to barbecue grills, and the like.

Hansen went public to dismiss Climategate with a response - helpfully linked to by the gang at Climate Progress as proof there’s nothing to see there - in which he describes how his office arrives at their data set. Oddly, he fails to admit that this process has depended on CRU data for global temperatures.

He does say, “Although the three input data streams that we use are publicly available from the organizations that produce them, we began preserving the complete input data sets each month in April 2008.” Ooh, all the way back then? He does not say that this occurred when they realized during the kerfuffle over what Steven McIntyre discovered about GISS in August 2007 that they, too, did not keep their original data which they they then manipulate to arrive at their claims. So he also left out that - as admitted in another e-mail I have - a Hansen colleague was relieved that he was able to obtain one of the needed, discarded data sets from a Brazilian journalist. Really. Thanks again, FOIA.

In the same post Hansen opens with a rather pathetic (given the regular, long-running tactics of his team) paean to the sorry state of affairs to which we have devolved such that people feel threatened for their views and speech. This must have gravely disappointed the nuts over at Climate Progress. So, two words Jim: Food-taster. I’d say car-starter, but you probably drive a hybrid, and they wouldn’t blow one of those up.

See post here.
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Those Climate Pugilists
By Paul Chesser, American Spectator

Pity the poor Climategaters. The staid were played. Gentlepersons were violated. And the billion-dollar global warming science complex can’t compete with spunky skeptics.

Those are some of the complaints registered in newly disclosed emails among members of the National Academy of Sciences, whose messages were mysteriously made public last week via the Washington Times. Some call it Climategate II; Whinergate is more apropos.

Among their electronically-sent lamentations:

• “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” said Paul “Nostradamus” Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist.

• “This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, ‘God, can’t we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,’” said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.

• “They’re not going to win short-term battles playing the game against big-monied interests because they can’t beat them,” Schneider, in a phone interview, talking about alleged competition with energy company funding of skeptics.

Wow—Schneider, who in a November interview with the New Republic announced, “I am an activist,” claims that he spurns spin. Just check the rest of his rhetoric from a few months ago:

• “The models have done really well on temperature over a long time period so we trust that.”

• “The IPCC says, ‘One to five degrees warming [by 2100]’ for example. That is an expert judgment; it’s subjective, but built on objective modeling and data.”

• “I don’t have aggregate dollars as my moral principle—I look at who’s responsible.”

Yes, the models were so good they missed the non-warming of the last 15 years—probably thanks to the Climategaters’ unassailable data. And like most alarmists who speak from the global warming script, Schneider looks only at opponents’ aggregate cash while linking it to their immoral stands against “science.” Meanwhile we are to believe his objective team of activists is untainted by the many more billions of dollars that flow to their research institutes and eco-minded nonprofits.

And undoubtedly it was principled, trustworthy, objective modeling and data that informed Schneider’s most recent (November) book: Science as a Contact Sport. As the inside jacket explains, “Schneider’s efforts have helped bring about important measures to safeguard our planet, but there’s still more to be done to get them implemented.” That “S” on his chest doesn’t represent his surname.

Schneider is so measured and balanced in his “sound science” advocacy, that in the new “Whinergate” emails he urges his NAS colleagues to admit Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Ben Santer to their exclusive society. “Can we please get that finally done next year!!” he doubly exclaimed.

You might recall the even-tempered Santer as the bloke from the original Climategate scandal that arose out of Britain’s University of East Anglia, who told Climatic Research Unit director Phil Jones that he’d be tempted—“very tempted”—to “beat the crap out of” skeptical climatologist Pat Michaels. Santer, as lead author of the UN IPCC’s 1995 second assessment report on the science, also admitted deleting statements that denied a human influence on climate change. This kind of behavior apparently has been established as common scientific procedure by “Contact Sport” practitioners—better known as “The Fight Club” within the NAS.

No wonder why, as the Washington Times reported last week, this discredited bunch wants to punch back at skeptics. The Whinergate emails disclosed that one of their strategies of persuasion is to chip in and purchase a back-page ad in the New York Times that would challenge their critics. This presumably would get their mini-choir of fellow elitists singing from their hymnal—but would totally miss the unconverted. Next up—a double-page glossy spread in Audubon! And they wonder why their message isn’t getting through.

Rock-solid science is built with a firm foundation of verifiable and repeatable tests, with trustworthy facts and figures as their sources. The Whinergate scientists employed fudged data and their personal agendas to belligerently promote a fabricated cause, amplified by their similarly unpopular anti-capitalist cohorts and ever-expanding government. Now they profess surprise at the growing resistance to their mission.

They still have not learned that all the money, media and muscle at their disposal have not produced sound science, or a victory. Tactics may provide a temporary advantage, but facts usually win, even though sometimes it takes a while. See post here.

The question of the day is how Paul Erlich, doomsayer deluxe, could still have a job never mind pen an editorial for Nature. In today’s world it doesn’t matter if you were ever right only that you are in agreement in Dick Lindzen’s words with “the sensibilities of the east and west coast” elitists. See this story on some of his former prognostications about the future of humanity including only 20 million people would still be alive in the U.S by 2000 because of pesticides. Recently he led the attack on skeptics in the New York Times “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.
Ehrlich started his academic career as an entomologist, an expert on Lepidoptera - butterflies. Following are excerpts from that Nature editorial.

The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.

Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it’s only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.

Worse, the onslaught seems to be working: some polls in the United States and abroad suggest that it is eroding public confidence in climate science at a time when the fundamental understanding of the climate system, although far from complete, is stronger than ever. Ecologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University in California says that his climate colleagues are at a loss about how to counter the attacks. “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do,” he says.

Scientists must not be so naive as to assume that the data speak for themselves. Researchers should not despair. For all the public’s confusion about climate science, polls consistently show that people trust scientists more than almost anybody else to give honest advice. Yes, scientists’ reputations have taken a hit thanks to headlines about the leaked climate e-mails at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, and an acknowledged mistake about the retreat of Himalayan glaciers in a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But these wounds are not necessarily fatal.

To make sure they are not, scientists must acknowledge that they are in a street fight, and that their relationship with the media really matters. Anything strategic that can be done on that front would be useful, be it media training for scientists or building links with credible public-relations firms. In this light, there are lessons to be learned from the current spate of controversies. For example, the IPCC error was originally caught by scientists, not sceptics. Had it been promptly corrected and openly explained to the media, in full context with the underlying science, the story would have lasted days, not weeks. The IPCC must establish a formal process for rapidly investigating and, when necessary, correcting such errors.

The unguarded exchanges in the UEA e-mails speak for themselves. Although the scientific process seems to have worked as it should have in the end, the e-mails do raise concerns about scientific behaviour and must be fully investigated. Public trust in scientists is based not just on their competence, but also on their perceived objectivity and openness. Researchers would be wise to remember this at all times, even when casually e-mailing colleagues.

US scientists recently learned this lesson yet again when a private e-mail discussion between leading climate researchers on how to deal with sceptics went live on conservative websites, leading to charges that the scientific elite was conspiring to silence climate sceptics (see page 149). The discussion was spurred by a report last month from Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma), the leading climate sceptic in the US Congress, who labelled several respected climate scientists as potential criminals - nonsense that was hardly a surprise considering the source. Some scientists have responded by calling for a unified public rebuttal to Inhofe, and they have a point. As a member of the minority party, Inhofe is powerless for now, but that may one day change. In the meantime, Inhofe’s report is only as effective as the attention it receives, which is why scientists need to be careful about how they engage such critics.

The core science supporting anthropogenic global warming has not changed. This needs to be stated again and again, in as many contexts as possible. Scientists must not be so naive as to assume that the data speak for themselves. Nor should governments. Scientific agencies in the United States, Europe and beyond have been oddly silent over the recent controversies. In testimony on Capitol Hill last month, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, offered at best a weak defence of the science while seeming to distance her agency’s deliberations from a tarnished IPCC. Officials of her stature should be ready to defend scientists where necessary, and at all times give a credible explanation of the science.

These challenges are not new, and they won’t go away any time soon. Even before the present controversies, climate legislation had hit a wall in the US Senate, where the poorly informed public debate often leaves one wondering whether science has any role at all. The IPCC’s fourth assessment report had huge influence leading up to the climate conference in Copenhagen last year, but it was always clear that policy-makers were reluctant to commit to serious reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Scientists can’t do much about that, but they can and must continue to inform policy-makers about the underlying science and the potential consequences of policy decisions - while making sure they are not bested in the court of public opinion.

At 19.4 degrees, February 2010 was the second coldest February of record here (since 1983), missing February 1989’s 18.2 by just over one degree.

• There were three less-than-impressive daily record lows in the 0 to -3 range. But there were other more impressive records:

• 17 consecutive days with daily max temperatures at or below 32F tied a record set in December 1983.

• 22 days with daily max temperatures at or below 32F tied the January 1988 record (and exceeds it if you consider that February is a short month).

• The monthly maximum of 40F tied December 1983 for the lowest monthly max on record.

And the biggie record....

• The three-month winter average (December-February) of 20.2F is, by almost one degree, the coldest winter on record here (28 winters). History of the past five winters: 2005-06 - coldest winter since 1997-98. 2006-07 - coldest winter since 1992-93; last snow drift melted July 6. 2007-08 - coldest winter on record, beat 83-84 by 0.7 degrees. 2008-09 - near normal. 2009-10 - coldest winter, beat 07-08 by 0.9 degrees.

For comparison here’s my ten coldest months: Dec-09 16.5 Dec-83 17.2 Feb-89 18.2 Dec-90 18.5 Jan-85 18.7 Jan-07 18.8 Jan-88 19.1 Dec-07 19.4 Feb-10 19.4 Jan-08 19.7 Note that five of the cold months occurred during 1983-1990 (8 years), None during 1991-2005 (15 years), And five during 2007-2010 (4 years). The season’s snow stands at 140.5 inches, the fourth greatest end-of-February total (after 2007, 1987, and 1998). February 28th is the normal mid-point of our snow season, with, on average, 100 inches by February and another 100 inches in March and the other “spring” months (including June).

A series of cold winters at one location may not seem too important, but the story is the same across much of the country (and both hemispheres of the planet). On an annual basis, Coal Creek correlates with the entire state of Colorado With a correlation R = 0.95. The IPCC projects Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, and the Intermountain West to have the greatest warming in the “lower 48” states - about 4C, or 7F, over this century (see IPCC fig-11-8-3). According to the IPCC models, greenhouse gas warming should be greatest over continental interiors and in the middle troposphere, so Coal Creek Canyon is an ideal “global warming” monitoring site. Annual and winter temperatures here in the Rockies show that the new century’s projected warming is off to a shaky start. Here is a graph of winter temperatures since 1983 with various trend lines and curves fit to the data. The linear trend has winter temperatures cooling by 1.1F per century, but with a R-squared of 0.0021 this trend line is hardly significant. The 2nd- and 3rd-order trend line fits have higher correlations and more impressive downturns in recent years, and the five-year running mean also shows a recent decline. However, the best fit is with my favorite non-linear trend line shown in the second graph.

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

By Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.

This is an update to my previous post describing a new technique for estimating the average amount of urban heat island (UHI) warming accompanying an increase in population density. The analysis is based upon 4x per day temperature observations in the NOAA International Surface Hourly (ISH) dataset, and on 1 km population density data for the year 2000.

I’m providing a couple of charts with new results, below. The first chart shows the global yearly average warming-vs-population density increase from each year from 2000 to 2009. They all show clear evidence of UHI warming, even for small population density increases at very low population density. A population density of only 100 persons per sq. km exhibits average warming of about 0.8 deg. C compared to a nearby unpopulated temperature monitoring location. (Enlarged here)

In this analysis, the number of independent temperature monitoring stations having at least 1 neighboring station with a lower population density within 150 km of it, increased from 2,183 in 2000, to 4,290 in 2009…an increase by a factor of 2 in ten years. The number of all resulting station pairs increased from 9,832 in 2000 to 30,761 in 2009, an increase of 3X.

The next chart shows how the results for the U.S. differ from non-US stations. In order to beat down the noise for the US-only results, I included all ten years (2000 thru 2009) in the analysis. The US results are obviously different from the non-US stations, with much less warming with an increase in population density, and even evidence of an actual slight cooling for the lowest population categories. (Enlarged here)

The cooling signal appeared in 5 of the 10 years, not all of them, a fact I am mentioning just in case someone asks whether it existed in all 10 years. I don’t know the reason for this, but I suspect that a little thought from Anthony Watts, Joe D’Aleo & others will help figure it out.

John Christy has agreed to co-author a paper on this new technique, since he has some experience publishing in this area of research (UHI & land use change effects on thermometer data) than me. We have not yet decided what journal to submit to.

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On the “march of the thermometers”
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

I’ve been away from WUWT this weekend for recovery from a cold plus family time as we have visitors, so I’m just now getting back to regular posting.  Recently on the web there has been a lot of activity and discussions around the issue of the dropping of climatic weather stations aka “the march of the thermometers” as Joe D’Aleo and I reported in this compendium report on issues with surface temperature records.

Most of the station dropout issue covered in that report is based on the hard work of E. M. Smith, aka “chiefio, who has been aggressively working through the data bias issues that develop when thermometers have been dropped from the Global Historical Climate Network. My contribution to the study of the dropout issue was essentially zero, as I focused on contributing what I’ve been studying for the past three years, the USHCN. USHCN has had a few station dropout issues, mostly due to closure, but nothing compared to the magnitude of what has happened in the GHCN.

That said, the GHCN station dropout Smith has been working on is a significant event, going from an inventory of 7000 stations worldwide to about 1000 now, and with lopsided spatial coverage of the globe. According to Smith, there’s also been an affinity for retaining airport stations over other kinds of stations. His count shows 92% of GHCN stations in the USA are sited at airports, with about 41% worldwide.

The dropout issue has been known for quite some time. In this post there is a video that WUWT contributor John Goetz made in March 2008 that shows the global station dropout issue over time. You might want to hit the pause button at time 1:06 to see what recent global inventory looks like.

The question that is being debated is how that dropout affects the outcome of absolutes, averages, and trends. Some say that while the data bias issues show up in absolutes and averaging, it doesn’t effect trends at all when anomaly methods are applied.

Over at Lucia’s Blackboard blog there have been a couple of posts on the issue that raise some questions on methods.  I’d like to thank both Lucia Liljegren and Zeke Hausfather for exploring the issue in an “open source” way. All the methods and code used have been posted there at Lucia’s blog which enables a number of people to have a look at and replicate the issue independently. That’s good.

E.M Smith at “chiefio” has completed a very detailed response to the issues raised there and elsewhere. You can read his essay here. His essay is lengthy, I recommend giving yourself more than a few minutes to take it all in. Joe D’Aleo and I will have more to say on this issue also. See post here.

Icecap Note: See also this post here.

See the number of missing months increase (enlarged here) with a strong bias towards the colder months.

See also this one on Alert station in Canada and GISS.
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Follow the Money

Enough is enough.

It’s about time that someone once and for all puts the lie to the recurrent charges that the AGW skeptical community is supported by “Big Oil”, or is populated by “flat-earthers”, or by those who in the past have been complicit with “the tobacco lobby”. These transparently pejorative statements are frequent inclusions in postings and commentary by AGW proponents , sometimes by less committed followers of the AGW controversy and even by some posters who are intellectually inclined to side with the skeptics. There are rarely any substantiating statements to support these allegations which in the absence of any formal repudiation by those so categorized, take on a life of their own like so many urban myths that populate the blogosphere.

The facts are that quite the opposite is the case. For example, let’s take “Big Oil”. BP has contributed over $500 Million to UC Berkeley, one of the Bay Area’s centers of AGW support, for its Energy Biosciences Institute. 

Stanford University has received $225 Million from ExxonMobil, Toyota and Schlumberger for its Global Climate and Energy Project.  That money will be combined with a $50 Million donation from alumnus Jay Precourt whose career as an oil engineer included such companies as Hamilton Oil and Tejas Gas Corp. The new entity will be named the Precourt Center for Energy Efficiency. See here.

Compare these numbers with a total of ~$6.4 Million over a 4-year period between 2002-2005 provided to non-academic and presumably more conservative think tanks by ExxonMobile according to data acquired by EDF (hardly an unbiased source). See here.

As for individuals active in the promotion of AGW, Susan Solomon, a Phd from Stanford and a lead author of the 2007 IPC Report was a recipient of the 2004 Blue Planet Prize, a 50 Million Yen (~$460,000) cash award from the Asahi Glass Foundation , see here. Other high profile figures such as James Hansen and Michael Mann have received six-figure amounts from organizations such as the Theresa Heinz Foundation and the Dan David Foundation. It seems as though being a staunch proponent of AGW is a very rewarding position to have.

These are just a fractional example of the money that has flowed from the private sector to individuals and academic institutions friendly to the notion of anthropogenic influences on the environment. Over the past 10 years Government funding to such organizations has been conservatively estimated at well over $50 Billion.

Compare these enormous sums of money with the amounts that are received by prominent and well qualified members of the skeptical community. I know from personal association that external funding for such sites as WUWT and icecap is in the low five figures and comes almost exclusively from individual donations from those who access these sites.  It would seem that the thinly veiled assertions from those expressing an alarmist position that people who adopt a more skeptical attitude are somehow insincere and must be doing it for the money. Since this is patently untrue, I submit that such accusations are more likely to be evidence of projection than of fiscal reality and they are more designed to obfuscate than enlighten the debate. 

See more here. 

By Lewis Page, The Register

Macdonald says that glaciers on land at the Equator means solid pack ice at sea in the tropics, too.

“Climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over,” he says. “So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation.”

Enlarged here.

Even on Snowball Earth, however, it’s thought that there must have been “refugia” where liquid surface water and at least occasional sunlight remained, as proto-animal life above the bacterial level is believed to have arisen and survived at around the time of the first, Sturtian snowballing. Macdonald considers that the big freeze may actually have stimulated early, primitive life to get its act together and begin the long process which has led to the present-day biosphere.

“The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic [other than microbial] groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation,” says the prof. “The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?”

“From an evolutionary perspective,” he adds, “it’s not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress.”

Macdonald and his colleagues aren’t sure what triggered the Sturtian snowball effect, but note that a lot of lava came to the earth’s surface at around that point, suggesting that the big chill could have been kicked off by volcanic dust darkening the skies.

The Harvard team publish their results this week in hefty boffinry mag Science.

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle
By Lewis Page, The Register

German and Russian scientists say that it is normal for an interglacial period like the one just ending to finish with one or more brief - in geological terms - spells of warming before the glaciers return.

According to boffins based at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the Earth’s history thus far there have been eras where the glaciers covered much of Europe, lasting about 100,000 years. These are separated by warmer interglacial periods lasting around 10,000 years. We are currently at the end of an interglacial era called the Holocene.

The scientists, looking into the last interglacial period - the Eemian - which ended around 115,000 years ago, say they have found that that it ended with “significant climate fluctuations” before the rule of the glaciers returned.

The scientists got their results by examining ancient lake sediments exposed by modern open-cast mining in Russia and Germany. They believe that the end of the Eemian interglacial epoch saw “possibly at least two” warming events, according to a statement issued by the UFZ.

“The observed instability with the proven occurrence of short warming events during the transition from the last interglacial to the last glacial epoch could be, when viewed carefully, a general, naturally occurring characteristic of such transition phases,” concludes UFZ boffin Dr Tatjana Boettger.

Boettger and her fellow researchers say that the Eemian ice-free period wound up with sudden - in these terms - warming spells and serious changes in vegetation. Then the glaciers surged south, at their high tide 21,000 years ago reaching as far as Berlin.

This Weichselian Glacial era ended around 15,000 years ago, leading to the conditions which have been seen for all of human history with the ice caps confined to the polar regions. The UFZ says that this Holocene era reached its “highest point so far around 6000 years ago” and that we might now expect to see sudden warmings and changes as at the end of the Eemian - followed by a slow descent into another freezing glacial era.

“Detailed studies of these phenomena are important for understanding the current controversial discussed climate trend so that we can assess the human contribution to climate change with more certainty,” comments Dr Frank W Junge of the Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Saxon Academy of Sciences, SAW) in Leipzig.

The profs’ paper Instability of climate and vegetation dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe during the final stage of the Last Interglacial (Eemian, Mikulino) and Early Glaciation can be read here (subscriber link).

By Steve Goddard Guest Post on Watts Up With That

Snow blankets New York City. Photo: Del Mundo, New York Daily News

Now that we have reached the end of the meteorological winter (December-February,) Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers (1967-2010) show that the just completed decade (2001-2010) had the snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters on record.  The just completed winter was also the second snowiest on record, exceeded only by 1978.  Average winter snow extent during the past decade was greater than 45,500,000 km2, beating out the 1960s by about 70,000 km2, and beating out the 1990s by nearly 1,000,000 km2.  The bar chart below (enlarged here) shows average winter snow extent for each decade going back to the late 1960s.

Here are a few interesting facts.

Average winter snow extent has increased since the 1990s, by nearly the area of Texas and California combined.

Three of the four snowiest winters in the Rutgers record occurred during the last decade - the top four winters are (in order) 1978, 2010, 2008, 2003. The third week of February, 2010 had the second highest weekly extent (52,170,000 m2) out of the 2,229 week record.

The bar graph below (enlarged here) shows winter data for each year in the Rutgers database, color coded by decade.  The yellow line shows the mean winter snow extent through the period.  Note that the past decade only had two winters below 45 million km2.  The 1990s had seven winters below the 45 million km2, the 1980s had five winters below 45 million km2, and the 1970s had four winters below 45 million km2.  This indicates that the past decade not only had the most snowfall, but it also had the most consistently high snowfall, year over year.

It appears that AGW claims of the demise of snowfall have been exaggerated.  And so far things are not looking very good for the climate model predictions of declining snowfall in the 21st century.

Many regions of the Northern Hemisphere have seen record snowfall this winter, including Washington D.C, Moscow, China, and Korea.  Dr. Hansen’s office at Columbia University has seen record snowfall, and Al Gore has ineptly described the record snow: “Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm,”

A decade long record across the entire Northern Hemisphere is not appropriately described as a “snowstorm.” See post and comments here.

By Climate Realists, Piers Corbyn

The feeble defence today (BBC Radio4 here) of the failed science of Man-made climate change by Lord Martin Rees President of the Royal Society is a “dereliction of his duty to defend the integrity of science and a surrender to the politically driven agenda of the UN which is mounting a ‘Custer’s last stand’ review of IPCC procedures in a desperate bid to save its credibility”, said Piers Corbyn astrophysicist and founder of WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters.

Piers (speaking on his birthday March 10th) further said: “Martin Rees is a great scientist but his support today of failed science over evidence-based factual observations is a betrayal of the scientific method in favour of anti-scientific dogma. One wonders at what point should political expediency ever over-rule evidence-based science?”

“His defence of the refuted theory of man-made climate change on the grounds that ‘CO2 has been rising recently at an unprecedented rate and very simple physics’ is without foundation.

Firstly the claim that current rates of rise of CO2 are unprecedented is neither relevant nor justifiable. Recognized published peer-reviewed work shows:

(i) measured data over hundreds, or thousands, or millions of years proves CO2 changes have no net driving effect on world temperature or climate, indeed the relationship is observed to be the other way around - for example at the end of ice-ages temperature rises drive CO2 rises with a lag of centuries. This means that current changes of CO2 are also of no consequence. This is demonstrated by world cooling for the last 8 years while CO2 has been rapidly rising.

(ii) ice core data smooths out rapid fluctuations in CO2 levels which occurred in the past and other methods of measuring CO2 in more recent times show rapid changes. The claim of unprecedented rises in something of no consequence is scaremongering nonsense. “Secondly the ‘very simple physics’ he claims to draw on is just too simple and leaves out other pretty simple physics. The supposed large magnifying effect of water vapour which is a more significant contributor to infra-red absorption and emission than the trace gas CO2 has been widely challenged along with other assumptions of the CO2 centred theory. More fundamentally wherever those considerations lead a number of feedback effects totally negate any impact CO2 changes may have on surface temperatures. For example extra CO2 enhances plant growth and photosynthetic transpiration which is a powerful cooling effect and the more CO2 the more the cooling. So any extra surface warming due to extra CO2 in the atmosphere is negated by extra cooling caused by extra photosynthetic transpiration. Warming also enhances plant growth so if at one point there were insufficient plants to do the cooling and therefore warming occurred that would enhance plant growth and extend the growing season until there are sufficient plants to provide cooling to negate any warming.

“Martin Rees and the IPCC should be prepared to defend their CO2-driven climate change position but they have still failed to produce any observational evidence for their hypothesis and the BBC consistently avoids allowing any air time to Climate Realist scientists who can easily refute the CO2 hypothesis. Nevertheless I am glad Martin Ress did not repeat the banal claims of Professor Corine Le Quere of the University of East Anglia that ‘There is no other explanation for it. Perhaps he realizes that our WeatherAction verification of predicted chains of events leading from solar activity to extreme weather events is evidence that the Sun causes ‘it’.

Read this and more here.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon has announced a respected international body will conduct an independent review of UN climate science after a global warming report was found to have errors.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has admitted its 2007 report exaggerated the pace of Himalayan glaciers melting. But Mr Ban says the errors should not affect the conclusion that human activities are changing the climate and that greenhouse gas emissions should be cut urgently.

“The threat posed by climate change is real, and nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change,” he said. Mr Ban told reporters that the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (IAC), which groups presidents of 15 leading science academies, will carry out the task “completely independently of the United Nations”.

The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, says he hopes the inquiry will restore public trust. “In recent months we have seen some criticism,” he said.
“We are receptive and sensitive to that and we are doing something about it. I am very grateful that the secretary-general has very kindly supported this initiative.” Dr Pachauri pledged that an upcoming fifth assessment report by the IPCC would be “stronger and better than anything we have produced in the past”.

The IAC’s co-chairman, Robbert Dijkgraaf, told reporters the panel aims to present its report by the end of next August so that governments can consider it ahead of key climate change meetings late this year. He says the review will focus on what procedures were used. “It will definitely not go over all the data, the vast amount of data in climate science,” he said. “What it will do [is] it will see what the procedures are and how they can be improved. So looking forward, how can we avoid that certain types of errors are made.” See post here.

UK Telegraph

Snowfalls of up to 50 centimetres (20 inches) were forecast for the worst affected areas of the region of Catalonia, prompting the regional government to cancel classes for more than 142,000 students at 476 public schools.

Power was lost in homes throughout the region, with energy company Fecsa-Endesa reporting 200,000 clients without electricity, mostly in the province of Girona.

Services workers helped evacuate some 500 passengers who became trapped on trains traveling between Barcelona and Portbou, on the French border, which became stuck due to the lack of power, said regional interior minister Joan Boada.

Thousands of commuters were left scrambling for an alternative way to get home after the blizzard forced the suspension of bus services in Barcelona and the closure of five suburban train lines in the Mediterranean port city.

Barcelona city hall ordered the metro system to stay open all night to help people move around the city. Traffic on over 60 roads in Catalonia was either prohibited or restricted. Spain’s border with France at La Jonquera was closed because of the snow, leaving some 4,000 trucks stranded, public television TVE reported.

While Barcelona’s El Prat airport was operating normally, 21 flights out of the airport in nearby Girona were cancelled and nine others were diverted to other cities due to the snow and strong winds, airport officials said. See story here.

See here how worst snow on March 8 since 1962/63 brings Barcelona to a complete collapse. Spring is around the corner, yet it was minus 6C last night in Madrid. The region of Catalonia had the worst snow storm in 25 years. Barcelona received enough snow to cause a collapse in traffic, and its beaches were covered in the white stuff. It is worse in the rest of the region, which is struggling under up to 60 cm of snow (more in the mountains). Snow tires are unknown in the country, so people struggle to put on chains when they are stranded ( not an easy job, and your fingers freeze quickly while doing it ). Thirty three high tension pylons collapsed under high winds which also caused 7-meter-high waves to crash on the coast. Two hundred thousand homes are still without electricity. Thousands of truck were stuck on the roads, and traffic jams on the motorway to France were 50 km long. Snow in the streets turned into ice, causing multiple accidents, and making sidewalks dangerous to walk on.

This is the third serious white winter Northern Spain had in a row. Further south, in Andalusia, it’s been raining for 3 months, and they hadn’t seen so much water in decades. The countryside is flooded in many parts, and some old houses have collapsed. Locals hadn’t experienced such inundations since the great one of 1963. See more here and here.

See in this story how the snow closed the border between France and Spain. Here is a photo from Elne in southern France.

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European Storms
By World Climate Report

The winter of 2009-2010 has produced its fair share of winter storms in the Northern Hemisphere - recall that President Obama arrived back in Washington from his appearance at the Copenhagen climate conference only to find the White House grounds buried under near-record amounts of snow. Europe and Asia have seen their share of large winter storms as well during the 2009-2010 winter. Hardly a large storm goes by without someone, somewhere suggesting that whatever we are seeing, it is related to “climate change”. If one looked no further than the Technical Summary of the IPCC, they would discover that the IPCC is rather quiet on this subject with no claims whatsoever that winter storms will increase in frequency, magnitude, duration, or intensity due to the ongoing changes in atmospheric composition.

Two new articles are out that further confirm that global warming has not and will not be causing mid-latitude winter storms to become some new destructive result of the greenhouse effect.

The first is by two scientists from Sweden and Poland, the article appears in the International Journal of Climatology, and the work was funded by the European Community. The title lets us know the authors are dealing with Scandinavian storminess back to 1780; one line in the abstract caught our attention as it says “We find pronounced interdecadal variability in cyclonic activity but no significant overall consistent long-term trend.”

Barring and Fortuniak begin their piece noting that “Long-term variability in extra-tropical cyclone frequency and strength is at the centre of international attention, both because of scientific theoretical analysis of climate change and because of socio-economic consequences of potential changes in storminess activity.” They state that these storms cause severe damage to property and forests and that storm surges associated with intense storms are damaging as well. They quite correctly remind us that “The question is whether changes to such storminess characteristics are a result of changes in frequency and intensity of deep cyclones in exposed regions. The essential problem is thus if any changes to cyclone activity are within natural variability or not, that is, the classical problem of climate change detection. As intense cyclones and severe windstorms are comparatively rare events, long-term records are required to capture the natural variability.”

We completely agree with their assessment - long-term records provide a necessary dimension of historical perspective and can often make any recent trends look very different. Barring and Fortuniak note that “Several studies using reanalysis data covering the second half of the 20th century suggest increasing storm intensity in the northeastern Atlantic and European sector.” So to extend the record back in time, they examined the thrice-daily sea level atmospheric pressure measurements taken in Stockholm and Lund. Their statistical methodology was complicated, but they showed that their method could clearly identify large storms in the past.

The authors present many graphs of storm activity, but the one below is probably the best one for capturing temporal variations in storm activity. The graph shows principal component scores taken from the Lund and Stockholm datasets; the values are standardized with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one; higher positive values are associated with periods with large storms and large negative values show periods of low storm activity. Imagine if the dataset began in 1950...the upward trend would lack the necessary context and perspective and might seem unusual–which, as the longer perspective shows, it is not.

Figure 1. Time evolution of principal component scores from the Lund and Stockholm datasets (from Barring and Fortuniak, 2009) enlarged here.

Barring and Fortuniak do not waste any words with their conclusions (the Dalton minimum occurred between 1790 and 1830, and was a time of low sunspot activity). They state “(1) There is no significant overall long-term trend common to all indices in cyclone activity in the North Atlantic and European region since the Dalton minimum. (2) The marked positive trend beginning around 1960 ended in the mid-1990s and has since then reversed. This positive trend was more an effect of a 20th century minimum in cyclone activity around 1960, rather than extraordinary high values in 1990s. Both the 1960s minimum and the 1990s maximum were within the long-term variability. (3) Because the period between the 1960s minima and the 1990s maxima spans a substantial part of the period covered by most reanalysis datasets, any analysis relying solely on such data is likely to find trends in cyclone activity and related measures.”

Our next article on the subject was published recently in Quaternary International by scientists with the UK’s University of Nottingham and Loughborough University. Their interest lies with western European coastlines and storms over a variety of timescales. Clarke and Rendell begin stating “There is growing evidence that periods of sand drift and dune development provide proxy records of the impacts of storms in coastal areas”. Furthermore, “An understanding of the patterns of past storminess is particularly important in the context of future anthropogenically driven climate change, with predictions of increased storm frequency and sea level rise by the end of the current century”. Once again, someone is out there suggesting an increase in storms frequency thanks to global warming.

They examine many other studies in their review article, and conclude (LIA is the Little Ice Age) “The analysis of documentary records, discontinuous instrumental data and proxy records indicate that the period of the LIA (AD 1570–1900) included periods of enhanced storminess relative to present. This increased storminess coincided with numerous episodes of sand drift and dune building along the western European coast, as demonstrated by both documentary records and independent dating of sand movement.” Furthermore, Clarke and Rendell found “The Holocene record of sand drift in western Europe includes episodes of movement corresponding to periods of Northern Hemisphere cooling, particularly 8.2 ka, and provides the additional evidence that these periods, like the LIA, were also stormy”

In other words, these articles suggest that it is the cooler periods in Europe that were stormier, not the warmer ones.

References:

Barring, L. and K. Fortuniak. 2009. Multi-indices analysis of southern Scandinavian storminess 1780-2005 and links to interdecadal variations in the NW Europe - North Sea region. International Journal of Climatology, 29, 373-384.

Clarke, M.L. and H.M. Rendell. 2009. The impact of North Atlantic storminess on western European coasts: A review. Quaternary International, 195, 31-41. 

A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author from Boston University.

The comprehensive study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters used the latest version of the NASA MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast pristine forests over the past decade.

A study published in the journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that those results were flawed and not reproducible.

Canopy of the Amazon rain forest. A new study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“This new study brings some clarity to our muddled understanding of how these forests, with their rich source of biodiversity, would fare in the future in the face of twin pressures from logging and changing climate,” said Boston University Prof. Ranga Myneni, senior author of the new study.

The IPCC is under scrutiny for various data inaccuracies, including its claim—based on a flawed World Wildlife Fund study—that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically and be replaced by savannas from even a slight reduction in rainfall.

“Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall,” said Sangram Ganguly, an author on the new study, from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute affiliated with NASA Ames Research Center in California.

“The way that the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are by far more reliable and correct,” said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of the IPCC. See report here.

Journal Reference: Samanta et al. Amazon forests did not green-up during the 2005 drought. Geophysical Research Letters, 2010; 37 (5): L05401 DOI: 10.1029/2009GL042154

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago - changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying ‘It is too so!’ In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC - which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992 - has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt - a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.

But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a ‘climate scientist’, initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December- in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen - but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.

The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research.

Peer reviewers in the formal IPCC process had flagged many of these errors and distortions during the writing of the 2007 report but were ignored. For example, the IPCC claimed that the world is experiencing rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events brought on by climate change. But the underlying paper, when finally published in 2008, expressly contradicted this, saying, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” Perhaps the most embarrassing walkback was the claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level, and therefore gravely threatened by rising sea levels. The correct number is 26 percent, which Dutch scientists say they tried to tell the IPCC before the 2007 report was published, to no avail. And in any case, a paper published last year in Nature Geoscience predicting a 21st-century sea level rise of up to 32 inches has been withdrawn, with the authors acknowledging mistaken methodology and admitting “we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.” The IPCC ignored several published studies casting doubt on its sea level rise estimates.

This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil ("hide the decline") Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years- all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan.

Read much more here.

"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 Commerce Department report published by the Washington Post. Writes the Post: “Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers. . . all point to a radical change in climate conditions and . . . unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone . . . Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones . . . while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”

More evidence of human-caused global warming? Hardly.

The above report of runaway Arctic warming is from a Washington Post story published Nov. 2, 1922 and bears an uncanny resemblance to the tales of global warming splattered across the front pages of today’s newspapers. It is one of many historical accounts published during the past 140 years describing climate changes and often predicting catastrophic cooling or warming.

Here are excerpts from a few of those accounts, appearing as early as 1870:

“The climate of New-York and the contiguous Atlantic seaboard has long been a study of great interest. We have just experienced a remarkable instance of its peculiarity. The Hudson River, by a singular freak of temperature, has thrown off its icy mantle and opened its waters to navigation.” - New York Times, Jan. 2, 1870

“Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade.” - New York Times, June 23, 1890

“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” - New York Times, Feb. 24, 1895

Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” - Chicago Tribune, Aug. 9, 1923

“The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” - Time Magazine, Sept. 10, 1923

Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” - New York Times, March 27, 1933

“America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder winters of grandfather’s day."- Associated Press, Dec. 15, 1934

Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says - “A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a “serious international problem,” Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today. - New York Times, May 30, 1937

“Greenland’s polar climate has moderated so consistntly that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area’s southern waters.” - New York Times, Aug. 29, 1954

“An analysis of weather records from Little America shows a steady warming of climate over the last half century. The rise in average temperature at the Antarctic outpost has been about five degrees Fahrenheit.” - New York Times, May 31, 1958

“Several thousand scientists of many nations have recently been climbing mountains, digging tunnels in glaciers, journeying to the Antarctic, camping on floating Arctic ice. Their object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: what is happening to the world’s ice? - New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958

“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.” - New York Times, Jan. 30, 1961

“Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age.” - Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23, 1962

“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.” - New York Times, Feb. 20, 1969

“By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half ...” - Life magazine, January 1970

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” - Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day, 1970

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner (Washington University), Earth Day, 1970

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, “the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” - Newsweek magazine, Jan. 26, 1970

“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.” - New York Times, July 18, 1970

“In the next 50 years, fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun’s rays that the Earth’s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.” - Washington Post, July 9, 1971

“It’s already getting colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes. . . .” - Los Angles Times, Oct. 24, 1971

“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” - New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978

“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” - New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978

“A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said… Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years.” - San Jose Mercury News, June 11, 1986

“Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants—at a cost of $110 billion—to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says...Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants - Associated Press, May 15, 1989

“New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 17, 1989 (actually Florida was more like New York 20 years later)

“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers . . . The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.” - “Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect,” Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, 1990.

“It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they’re going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we’ll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we’ll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you’ll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” according to Dr. Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory. - BBC, Nov. 7, 1997 (followed immediately in late 1998 by three straight years of La Nina)

“Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”—The Birmingham Post in England, July 26, 1999

“This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998.” - ScienceDaily, Jan. 5, 2007

Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. - National Geographic News, June 20, 2008

“So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually.” Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS), The Observer, Feb. 15, 2009.

Climate change? Yes, there has been plenty of that during the past 140 years. Despite warnings by “experts of the day” of approaching climate disasters, mankind somehow managed to survive. A decade or so from now, after earth’s climate changes once again, those who are old enough will recall with amusement the time, early in the 21st century, when the world went crazy over an imaginary threat called “global warming.”

Kirk Myers is one of the few environmental reporters who is bothering to look at actual data - not reading from the guidelines provided by the Society of Environmental Journalists. We applaud him for his boldness.

This posting is a little bit different for me.  First, the motivation. In looking at the GISS anomaly maps, Turkey is always roasting. There was something about that that just seemed wrong. It ought to have been a more random event; who was Hot Hot Hot and who was not.

So I took a look at the dT/dt report and and noticed that there was a clear “kink” in the data. It was running along flat, then about 1991 - 1995 it popped up and then continued running fairly flat with some rise. Odd, that ‘step function’. CO2 does not do a step function. Airports don’t do a step function. UHI does not do a step function…

(For folks new to this: dT/yr is the “sum of the changes of temperature, month now vs the same month that last had valid data, for each year”. An anomaly process similar to First Differences. Then dT is the running total of those changes, or the total change, the “Delta Temperature” to date.)

Click here to enlarge

Notice that the dT line is the “cumulative” dT/yr. Notice also that right around 1990 the dT/yr goes very small in range. The volatility just leaves it. So we see that dT is running along at a lower value, and dT/yr is dead flat for a couple of years, THEN about 1994 dT/yr pops up and dT starts a run for the moon. So what happened between 1990 and 1994?

The Great Dying Of Thermometers took out a lot of thermometers. Further, a bunch of old “modification flags” end and some new ones begin. Turkey had a fairly large number of thermometers, but that number plunges. Still, it’s a bit large for really seeing exactly what happens thermometer by thermometer. Looking at the temperature data directly, there were a lot of overlapping adds and drops.

So their is a bit of ‘feathering’ or ‘blending’ of the dropping, adding, and changing. I believe that is why when you look at the dT/yr right about 1989 - 1993 it goes to very small volatility, even though a large number of thermometers leave the record (or perhaps, because of it). Eventually we are left with a lot of new Modification Flag thermometers and very few of the older consistent record.

What is a “Modification Flag”? It is an indication that SOMETHING about that data record is different and that it needs different handling than the prior record. It could be a new thermometer at that location, or it could be a new Time Of Observation (changed procedures) or it might be simply that the thermometers and the TOBS are the same, but some “post processing” is different. A different QA method tossing out “outliers” or a different “TOBS adjustment” or just about anything. Basically, it means “Something that matters changed”. I’d say so…

Now look again at the dT/yr line. Notice anything? Run your eye along the peaks at about the 1.3 C level just above the 1 C line. Notice the consistent peaks? Now run your eye along the -1 C line. Notice the consistent peaks starting before 1970? Now run your eye along at about -0.5 C. Notice how much more area is in the down spikes before 1990 when compared with after? Something started to slightly clip the lower excursions in the ‘80s, but that 1990 change substantially eliminates them and strongly dampens or blunts any more than about -0.75 C and reduces the number significantly.

Don’t know what it was, but it happens at the same time the Mod Flags change. And we’ve seen this in Canada (as the Smith Effect at Fort Smith) and I’ve seen it in dozens of other cases around the planet. The “warmth” is from clipping of the cold spikes, and it has onset with the Mod Flag change.

Read more about Turkey and Mauritius here.

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Germany - Not Warming

This is an interesting little graph. It shows the “change of temperatures in a year”, that is the dT/yr, and the cumulative change over the life of all the thermometers, dT. What surprised me most when I made it was that it was so flat that the two lines were on top of each other. I had to make the dT/yr line semitransparent to make it readable. (Click here for a really big version).

I was so surprised at the 1850 to date flatness that I extended it back to 1750 just to see if they were still stable in the far past. Yup. 260 years, flat. First off, this is interesting because the Germans are generally known for being real sticklers about issues of precision and quality. Not the sort of folks to cut corners on where or how temperatures are to be measured.

Secondly, because other countries in the same general area do have warming trends in their data. And then there is poor Turkey, burning up in comparison. All of which argues for instrument error as much more likely than CO2. At least, I can’t think of any way for CO2 to “Give Germany a pass”.
And yet Germany has a strong “Green” movement that is highly vocal about “Global Warming” and has policies promoting the various forms of carbon reduction. One can only guess that the politicians there don’t look at their own temperatures much.

But this did give me an idea on how to fix “Global Warming”. For any country who’s change of temperature over time is within a small fraction of flat, give them a complete “free ride” on all the Carbon Cap & Trade, CO2 Sequestration, Light Bulb Police, you name it. Declare them a “Guilt Free Zone”. Somehow I think we would find Global Warming evaporate in a tide of precision and calibration.

In that spirit, I hereby declare Germany a “Carbon Guilt-Free Zone”. See post here.

Barack Obama promised many things on his way into office. Key among these was transparency and a vow to banish lobbyists from insider roles in the policy process.

Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Competitive Enterprise Institute has confirmed that both promises are being aggressively violated.

In 2008 and 2009, Mr. Obama told Americans on no fewer than eight occasions to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain [and] Germany” to see his model for successful “green jobs” policies, and what we should expect here.

Some Spanish academics and experts on that country’s wind- and solar-energy policies and outcomes took Mr. Obama up on his invitation, revealing Spain’s policies to be economic and employment disasters. The political embarrassment to the administration was obvious, with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs asked about the Spanish study at a press conference, and the president hurriedly substituted Denmark for Spain in his stump speech.

Team Obama was not amused, and they decided to do something about it. The crew that campaigned on change pulled out the oldest plan in the book - attack the messenger. The U.S. government’s response to foreign academics, assessing the impact in their own country of that foreign government’s policies, was to come after them in a move that internal e-mails say was unprecedented. They also show it was coordinated with the lobbyists for “Big Wind” and the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP).

What emerged was an ideological hodgepodge of curious and unsupported claims published under the name of two young non-economist wind advocates. These taxpayer-funded employees offered green dogma in oddly strident terms and, along the way, a senior Obama political appointee may well have misled Congress.

Congress was naturally curious about how the administration would end up attacking foreign academics, so Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, asked how these unprecedented offensives were launched, given that National Renewable Energy Lab and the Energy Department immediately offered conflicting statements to the media and a congressional oversight office.

Mr. Sensenbrenner asked for details from Cathy Zoi, assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Department of Energy (DOE) and until recently, the CEO of Al Gore’s climate-advocacy group. She dodged four pointed questions.

However, the documents we uncovered reveal that her office was fully aware of the answers to these questions, but elected to keep the information to itself.

What transpired is difficult to discern with precision, as DOE continues to withhold numerous responsive documents. But it is clear that senior staff in Ms. Zoi’s office, and another under her authority, were told by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) of its concern over the foreign economic analysis because of the media and policymaker attention it was receiving.

The questions raised about green jobs also threatened the vast increase in Department of Energy spending to pursue green jobs. The Obama administration has poured cash into renewable-energy efficiency and renewable energy with abandon. One such program at the department has grown from a budget of $1.7 billion in 2008 to $18 billion in 2009.

What is clear is that the Department of Energy then worked with Center for American Progress and the industry lobby AWEA to produce an attack that would serve all their interests.

That may not be all because we have appealed energy’s decision to withhold numerous documents. Incredibly, it refuses to release documents exchanged between it and the pressure group CAP and lobbyist AWEA on the grounds that these are “inter-agency memoranda.”

So, lobbyists and lavishly funded political advocacy groups are, for purposes of secrecy, mere extensions of the Obama administration. Transparency in the Age of Obama means so transparent, you can’t see it.  See also this post from James Delinpole on grren jobs.

Chris Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the best-selling “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” (Regnery, 2008).

And from Lucianne’s coverage of Chris’s story this comment on connecting the dots.

Here are some dots:

• The biggest producer of wind turbines in the US is General Electric. Most of these devices are manufactured overseas. The 1.5 MW machines are produced principally in Salzbergen Germany and Nobeljas, Spain. A more powerful 2.5 MW gearless version will be made by GE in China.

• GE also produces electric motors and recently acquired AstroPower the largest US producer of solar cells.

• The CEO and Chairman of GE is Jeffrey Immelt.

• A Year ago Immelt was named to President Obama’s Economic Advisory Board.

• President Obama is pushing hard for alternative enery resources and has allocated massive funding to support such technology as as wind turbines, electric automobiles and solar power.

• One hears scant mention of Immelt’s activities and the failure of wind-farm programs in Spain on business media programs like CNBC, or MSM news/talk shows like MSNBC.

• GE owns NBC Universal.

These are just some dots.

Now, •-•-•-•-•-•-• connect them.

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Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun
By Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times

Two years ago, this gritty mining city hosted a brief 21st-century gold rush. Long famous for coal, Puertollano discovered another energy source it had overlooked: the relentless, scorching sun.  Two years ago, this gritty mining city hosted a brief 21st-century gold rush. Long famous for coal, Puertollano discovered another energy source it had overlooked: the relentless, scorching sun. Puertollano, a mining center, has wooed the solar industry. Armed with generous incentives from the Spanish government to jump-start a national solar energy industry, the city set out to replace its failing coal economy by attracting solar companies, with a campaign slogan: “The Sun Moves Us.”

Soon, Puertollano, home to the Museum of the Mining Industry, had two enormous solar power plants, factories making solar panels and silicon wafers, and clean energy research institutes. Half the solar power installed globally in 2008 was installed in Spain.

Farmers sold land for solar plants. Boutiques opened. And people from all over the world, seeing business opportunities, moved to the city, which had suffered from 20 percent unemployment and a population exodus.

But as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own.

In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. Puertollano’s brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies. Read more here.

8 Mar 10 - “Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting - and seas are rising,” said Al Gore in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on February 27. Both parts of Gore’s statement are false. Never mind that Mr. Gore makes only passing reference to the IPCC’s fraudulent claims that the Himalayan glaciers will all melt by 2035. ("A flawed overestimate,” he explains.)

Never mind that Mr. Gore dismisses the IPCC’s fraudulent claims that the oceans are rising precipitously. ("Partly inaccurate,” he huffs.) Never mind that Mr. Gore completely ignores the admission by the CRU’s disgraced former director Phil Jones that global temperatures have essentially remained unchanged for the past 15 years. I’ll let someone else dissect Gore’s lawyering comments, and concentrate on just the one sentence about melting ice, because neither part of that sentence is true. Contrary to Gore’s assertions, almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are growing, not melting - and the seas are not rising.

Let’s look at the facts.

If you click on the words “are melting” in Gore’s article, you’re taken to a paper by Michael Zemp at the University of Zurich. Mr. Zemp begins his paper by warning that “glaciers around the globe continue to melt at high rates.” However, if you bother to actually read the paper, you learn that Zemp’s conclusion is based on measurements of “more than 80 glaciers.” Considering that the Himalayas boast more than 15,000 glaciers, a study of “more than 80 glaciers” hardly seems sufficient to warrant such a catastrophic pronouncement.  Especially when you learn that of those 80 glaciers, several are growing.

Growing. Not melting. “In Norway, many maritime glaciers were able to gain mass,” Zemp concedes. ("Able to gain mass” means growing.) In North America, Zemp also concedes, “some positive values were reported from the North Cascade Mountains and the Juneau Ice Field.” ("Displaying positive values” means growing.) Remember, we’re still coming out of the last ice age. Ice is supposed to melt as we come out of an ice age. The ice has been melting for 11,000 years. Why should today be any different? I’m guessing that most Canadians and Northern Europeans are very happy that the ice has been melting.

Unfortunately, that millenniums-long melting trend now appears to be changing. No matter how assiduously Mr. Gore tries to ignore it, almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are now gaining mass. (Or, displaying positive values, if you will.) For starters, let’s look at those Himalayan glaciers. In a great article, entitled “World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown,” Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings show that the IPCC’s fraudulent claims were based on “speculation” and “not supported by any formal research.”

As a matter of fact, many Himalayan glaciers are growing. In a defiant act of political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas - including Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat - are actually growing.  “These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”

And get this. Eighty seven of the glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s. So much for Mr. Gore’s “more than 80 glaciers.” (I don’t know how many Himalayan glaciers are being monitored, but my guess would be fewer than a thousand, so it’s possible that hundreds more are growing. There aren’t enough glaciologists in the world to monitor them all.) But we don’t need to look to the Himalayas for growing glaciers. Glaciers are growing in the United States. Yes, glaciers are growing in the United States.

Look at Washington State. The Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier Peak in northern Washington are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt. Saint Helens is now larger than it was before the 1980 eruption. (I don’t think all of the glaciers in Washington or Alaska are being monitored either.) Or look at California. All seven glaciers on California’s Mount Shasta are growing. This includes three-mile-long Whitney glacier, the state’s largest. Three of Mount Shasta’s glaciers have doubled in size since 1950.

Or look at Alaska. Glaciers are growing in Alaska for the first time in 250 years. In May of last year, Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier was advancing at the rate of seven feet (two meters) per day - more than half-a-mile per year. And in Icy Bay, at least three glaciers advanced a third of a mile (one-half kilometer) in one year. Oh, by the way. The Juneau Icefield, with its “positive values,” covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere. Rather interesting to know that Gore’s own source admits that the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere is growing, don’t you think?

But this mere handful of growing glaciers is just an anomaly, the erstwhile Mr. Gore would have you believe. Well, let’s look at a few other countries. Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing. Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing. Glaciers are growing on Mt. Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada. Glaciers are growing on Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.

Glaciers are growing in Norway, says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE). And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing.  But this is nothing. These glaciers are babies when you look at our planet’s largest ice masses, namely, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Contrary to what you may have heard, both of those huge ice sheets are growing.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D’Aleo. While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years, and ice near it diminished during the summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and the ice extent greater.  Antarctic sea ice is also increasing. According to Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison, sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years have been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

The Antarctic Peninsula, where the ice has been melting, is only about 1/50th the size of east Antarctica, where the ice has been growing. Saying that all of Antarctica is melting is like looking at the climate of Oregon and saying that this applies to the entire United States. There was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting, says Dr. Allison. “The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west.” And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual. “A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.”

What about Greenland? Greenland’s ice-cap has thickened slightly in recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming, said a team of scientists in October 2005.  The 3,000-meter (9,842-feet) thick ice-cap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 meters.

But satellite measurements show that more snow is falling and thickening the ice-cap, especially at high altitudes, according to the report in the journal Science. Te overall ice thickness changes are approximately plus 5 cm (1.9 inches) per year or 54 cm (21.26 inches) over 11 years, according to the experts at Norwegian, Russian and U.S. institutes led by Ola Johannessen at the Mohn Sverdrup center for Global Ocean Studies and Operational Oceanography in Norway. Not overwhelming growth, certainly, but a far cry from the catastrophic melting that we’ve been lead to believe. 

Think about that. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States. Put the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets together, and they’re one hundred times bigger than all of the rest of the world’s glaciers combined. More than 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

But if so many of the world’s glaciers are growing, how can sea levels remain the same? They can’t. The sea level models are wrong. During the last ice age, sea levels stood some 370 feet (100 meters) lower than today. That’s where all of the moisture came from to create those two-mile-high sheets of ice that covered so much of the north. And just as the ice has been melting for 11,000 years, so too were sea levels rising during those same years.

But the rising has stopped. Forget those IPCC claims. Sea levels are not rising, says Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, one-time expert reviewer for the IPCC.  Dr. Morner, who received his PhD in geology in 1969, is one of the greatest - if not the greatest - sea level experts in the world today. He has worked with sea level problems for 40 years in areas scattered all over the globe. “There is no change,” says Morner. “Sea level is not changing in any way.” “There is absolutely no sea-level rise in Tuvalo,” Morner insists. “There is no change here, and there is zero sea-level rise in Bangladesh. If anything, sea levels have lowered in Bangladesh.” “We do not need to fear sea-level rise,” says Morner. “(But) we should have a fear of those people who fooled us.”

So there you have it. More falsehoods from Al Gore, the multimillionaire businessman who some say is set to become the world’s first carbon billionaire.
Our glaciers are growing, not melting - and the seas are not rising. I agree with Dr. Morner, but I’d make it a tad stronger. We should have a fear of those people who have conned us.See post and more here.

Gallup’s annual update on Americans’ attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.

These results are based on the annual Gallup Social Series Environment poll, conducted March 4-7 of this year. The survey results show that the reversal in Americans’ concerns about global warming that began last year has continued in 2010—in some cases reverting to the levels recorded when Gallup began tracking global warming measures more than a decade ago.

For example, the percentage of Americans who now say reports of global warming are generally exaggerated is by a significant margin the highest such reading in the 13-year history of asking the question. In 1997, 31% said global warming’s effects had been exaggerated; last year, 41% said the same, and this year the number is 48% (below, enlarged here).

Fewer Americans Think Effects of Global Warming Are Occurring

“In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century."Many global warming activists have used film and photos of melting ice caps and glaciers, and the expanding reach of deserts, to drive home their point that global warming is already having alarming effects on the earth. While these efforts may have borne fruit over much of the 2000s, during the last two years, Americans’ convictions about global warming’s effects have waned.

A majority of Americans still agree that global warming is real, as 53% say the effects of the problem have already begun or will do so in a few years. That percentage is dwindling, however. The average American is now less convinced than at any time since 1997 that global warming’s effects have already begun or will begin shortly.

Meanwhile, 35% say that the effects of global warming either will never happen (19%) or will not happen in their lifetimes (16%). The 19% figure is more than double the number who held this view in 1997 (below, enlarged here).

Full report

GlobalWarming: The Other Side

See John Coleman’s one-hour special on KUSI Global Warming, the Other Side here. See his part II Global Warming Meltdown here. NEW: See his latest interview with Anthony Watts here. See his latest interview with Dr Fred Singer here. See his very revealing story on Roger Revelle here. See his powerful interview with E.M. Smith here.  See his other videos here.

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The Early Weather Channel Days and a Discussion of Global Warming
By Joe D’Aleo and Andre Bernier

Here more of an interview, I did with TV Meteorologist Andre Bernier of FOX 8 in Cleveland on Weatherjazz, who was a student of mine at Lyndon State College, and who by luck of the draw, was one of two on-camera meteorologists who did the first half hour of the Weather Channel (along with Bruce Edwards) on May 2, 1982. We talked about both the early days of the Weather Channel and global warming. The audio is here. See also episode 21 on November 10, 2009, when we talked about the upcoming winter.

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Climategate 2.0 - The NASA Files: It’s The Data, Not The Globe, That’s Cooked (Part 1)
To the activist judges and activist journalists we know, add the activist scientists we don’t. Bill Whittle talks to bestselling author Christopher C. Horner, author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. See it here.

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Monckton’s Sydney Australia lecture and Q&A videos here courtesy of Dr. Bob Carter.

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Henk Tennekes - He Was right After All

Read all about this skeptic pioneer - who faced the wrath of the warmers but is now being vindicated here.

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Here is a series of radio interviews by Kim Greenhouse on It’s Rainmaking Time:

Sea Level Not Rising
by Kim Greenhouse on February 22, 2010

Geologist and author Dr. Nils-Axel Morner tells us what’s really happening with sea levels, and why the truth really needs to be known. Perhaps the most graphically disturbing piece of information in the climate arena is the assertion that sea levels will rise to a catastrophic degrees. An Inconvenient Truth scared many people, and the sea level issue continues to worry them. The imagery from the movie is still etched in our minds and hearts. Imagery is powerful even if it is untrue. It lingers in the subconscious mind, where it can affect our ability to think critically and receive whole-systems information. We must be vigilant to prevent this.

In this show, Dr. Nils-Axel Morner clarifies many misconceptions about rising sea levels and offers a comprehensive understanding of this subject. Dr Morner is highly qualified to speak on the matter. He was the former President of International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA). Under his charge, when INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, after deliberations and discussions at several international meetings, declared a possible sea level change of +5 cm plus or minus 15cm by the year 2100, it was based on a huge amount of world-wide data gathered by scientists from different parts of the globe. 26 Feb 10 - Dr Nils-Axel Morner, geologist, physicist, and one-time expert reviewer for the IPCC, announced this week that, contrary to IPCC claims, sea levels are not rising. 

“Sea level is not changing in any way, “ said Dr Morner in an hour-long interview with Kim Greenhouse of “It’s Rainmaking Time.”

Dr. Morner, who received his PhD in geology in 1969, is one of the greatest - if not the greatest - experts on sea levels in the world today. He has worked with sea level problems for 40 years in areas scattered all over the globe. There is no change, says Morner. There is absolutely no sea-level rise in Tuvalo, there is no change here, and there is zero sea-level rise in Bangladesh. If anything, sea levels have lowered in Bangladesh.

We do not need to fear sea-level rise, says Morner. However, “we should have a fear of those people who fooled us.”

Rethinking Wind Power
By Kim Greenhouse, It’s Rainmaking Time, February 5, 2010

In this show, guest Lawrence Dwight, Jr. of Dwight Investment Counsel gives us valuable insight into true energy independence and the economics of wind power. We tend to perceive it as an exciting, cost-effective, sustainable energy solution for the future. It seems very alluring. But is it really as great as we’ve been told?

The details suggest that wind power may not be as affordable or efficient as we thought. Of course everything has its place, but where does wind power fit in? How does it work? And who benefits from using it? Tune in to find out! Go here.

The Art of Weather
By Kim Greenhouse on January 11, 2010

When I learned about a meteorologist who was teaching educational weather programs at elementary, middle, and high schools, I became very excited! Voted the best weatherman in Palm Beach, Art Horn was a weather anchor for 25 years. He spoke at the first International Climate Change Conference in New York in 2008. Now he teaches a popular program about weather that informs audiences about the realities and myths of climate change.

Art founded the program “The Art of Weather” and writes online for The Energy Tribune, Pajamas Media, and China Daily. He received an Emmy nomination and a Telly award for a documentary he produced called “Hurricane: Direct Hit”.  Join us for an enlightening interview that is sure to broaden your perspectives on climate change! Click here for more and streaming audio interview.

An Inquiry About Polar Bears With Dr. Mitch Taylor
By Kim Greenhouse on January 8, 2010

We have heard plenty about diminishing polar bear populations and the loss of their habitats due to melting sea ice. I thought it was about time that we defined an initial frame of reference for polar bears in order to empower personal inquiry into their status. Dr. Mitch Taylor has 30 years of professional experience studying polar bears firsthand in the field. Consider this segment an introduction to polar bears through one man’s professional life amongst them.

Now more than ever, anyone doing this kind of work is worth listening to and learning from. Mitch Taylor’s perspective is refreshing and rare. How many people do you know that have lived such a life? Spend some time with us and learn about these beautiful animals that many of us have come to love. No matter how much confusion and conflict may surround the concept of climate, one thing is for sure: many of us are concerned about our friends, the polar bears. Click here to hear interview.

The International Climate Change Treaty at Copenhagen
By Kim Greenhouse on December 9, 2009

Lord Viscount Monckton of Brenchley joins us live from the Copenhagen Climate Conference to reveal the legal underbelly of this event, and to share his take on the entire new international power deal being sealed in Denmark. The focus of this conference is the introduction of one of the most critical International Frameworks outside of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU and the New Call for a World Banking System and Currency.

If you want to hear the single most controversial figure in the Climate Change arena - one who is well-grounded in the evolution of the IPCC and the Science itself, who understands and has read the new legal framework which is about to be signed - please tune in. He is with SPPI. Here the interview here.

CO2: The Breath of Life or A Dangerous Pollutant?
By Kim Greenhouse on December 15, 2009

On December 7th, 2009 - Day 1 of the Copenhagen Climate Conference - the EPA declared that carbon dioxide (CO2) is now a pollutant. I thought that we had better get to the seed of the matter right away and explore scientific facts about CO2. Instead of focusing on the declarations of major stakeholders in the new industrial complex, I wanted to learn how CO2 affects Nature. What I discovered may startle you.

I personally believed that carbon dioxide was a pollutant. For many years, that has been the official story: that CO2 is the root cause of “Global Warming”. However, Nature apparently views it as “the breath of life”.

I reached out to someone who has studied CO2 for many years in order to get a clear perspective. On the spur of the moment, I called Sherwood Idso, the president of The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change, who graciously granted me an interview on short notice. I’m glad I did it! His many years of experience and multi-disciplinary expertise were very enlightening. Listen and see what you think. See CO2Science. Here interview here.

A True Inquiry Into Climate & Weather, Part 2: The Plot Thickens
By Kim Greenhouse on November 14, 2009

The plot really does thicken as we continue our inquiry into climate and weather. The verifiable data offered in this interview is both fascinating and disturbing. Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and climatologist Dr. David Legates (University of Delaware) brief us on key scientific data that cannot be overlooked or dismissed.

I deeply appreciate the gift of real knowledge that these men have brought us. Speaking with clarity, passion, and openness, they identify numerous factors that leave the average activist and global warming advocate with a totally different understanding of what is really occurring. They display a rare courage in standing up for the integrity of verifiable science as they continue to speak truth to power against vicious attacks.

Have a listen. See what you come up with and ask the questions that need to be asked. If addressed improperly, this incredibly complex up-and-coming piece of inquiry could lead humanity to shocking and chilling new discoveries about climate that will overshadow global politics and outweigh any ideology.

A True Inquiry Into Climate & Weather, Part 1: A Hot Potato
By Kim Greenhouse on October 25, 2009

This broadcast segment addresses the urgent need for verifiable facts about climate and weather that have been unable to make their way in a cohesive, understandable way to the public. The first in a multi-part series, this show features Bob Felix, author of Not by Fire, But By Ice and Magnetic Reversals & Evolutionary Leaps. Bob has spent considerable time researching climate, extinctions, magnetic reversals and ice ages. His books present staggering evidence of global cooling that suggests an ice age could begin at any moment (i.e. NOW!).

As I prepared for this interview, I came across two other individuals that I felt would contribute greatly to the discussion. Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo (of http://icecap.us) and climatologist Dr. Tim Ball join us to provide a broader perspective on climate change and explain what’s missing from the established climate dialogues. The information these men bring to bear will shake you to your very foundations!

Well-meaning politicians must open their field of receptivity to improve their understanding of climate in a larger context - one that is devoid of political and economic survival, peer pressure, fear of marginalization, and fear of losing their positions. As a result, a gross body of distortion and misinformation exists about the climate dangers we are truly facing.

The truth is that very few of us understand climate or weather. Most of us have taken a blind faith approach to researching these subjects. Unfortunately, this will be to the great detriment of all of humanity. In order to adequately prepare for coming changes, we need a different framework to quickly and properly understand weather and climate. Get ready to learn things you have never known before about weather, climate, and the business of climate change! Listen here.

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The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) - a DC think tank - has produced a science-based critique of a recent film produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The SPPI paper is entitled Acid Test: The
Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification - A New Propaganda Film by the National Resources Defense Council Fails the Acid Test of Real World Data

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Fourth International Conference on Climate Change on May 16-18, 2010, Chicago, Illinois.

Make plans now to attend ICCC-4, an international conference on climate change calling attention to new scientific research on the causes and consequences of climate change, and to economic analysis of the cost and effectiveness of proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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75% of American Meteorological Society Broadcasters Reject IPCC Man-made Climate Claims
By Bill Murray, Weather Historian, Alabamawx.com

A survey of weathercasters’ feelings on global warming was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It had some interesting findings. There were 121 respondents. 94% of the respondents had at least one of the three major seals.

Television meteorologists are the official scientists for most television stations. The overwhelming majority felt comfortable in that role for their stations. The majority agreed that the role of discussing climate change did fall to them.

The eyebrow raising responses:

“Respond to this IPCC conclusion: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” Only 35% agreed or strongly agreed. 34% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

“Most of the warming since 1950 is likely human induced.” A full 50% disagreed or strongly disagreed. 25% were neutral on this question. Only 8% strongly agreed.

“Global climate models are reliable in their predictions for a warming of the planet.” Only 3% strongly agreed and another 16% agreed. A full 62% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

“Respond to one TV weathercaster’s Quote saying “Global warming is a scam.” Responses were mixed. The largest percentage was neutral, at 26%. A total of 45% disagreed (23%) or strongly disagreed (22%). 19% of the respondents agreed with this statement and 10% strongly agreed.

The amount of uncertainty found in this survey tells that even the most educated and motivated communicators are still uncertain about the truth on this issue. Interesting article.

The entire text can be found here.

ICECAP NOTE: The broadcasters asked for more materials such as powerpoints and graphics which they could use to better study and present climate change.

Here is an excellent very detailed time-line and forensic analysis on climate-gatedone by an Australian physicist.

Here is an excellent source of short videos by the top scientists to provide an alternative to the dogma from COMET and Heidi Cullen and Climate Central and sadly The Weather Channel.  KUSI’s Coleman’s Corner has four videos by Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr. Willie Soon, John Coleman and Joe D’Aleo here.

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.

Excellent libraries of stories and papers and reviews can be found at Climate Science weblog by Roger Pielke Sr., CO2 Science site with the Idsos, Watts Up With That with Anthony Watts and Friends, World Climate Report, SPPI compiled by Bob Ferguson, Climate Audit by Steve McIntyre and Friends of Science with Tim Ball and others. This is just a few web sources.

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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additonal scientific youtubes here. Note that many more are coming, in part thanks to your donations.

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See 500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming here. See more here and still more annotated here.

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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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Available now some items that will gore your alarmist friends (part of the proceeds go to support Icecap) SOME NEW ITEMS:

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:

Science and Public Policy Institute here.

Intellicast Dr. Dewpoint Library here.

RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.

Weather/Climate and Health here.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool.