It’s so ironic. The “science” of global warming is only as strong as the evidence that supports it. Yet alarmists have shown themselves increasingly willing to discard that evidence in order to promote hysteria. Thus they knock the legs out from under their own advantage. It’s perverse.

All four previous interglacial periods were as warm or warmer than the present. Were these brief periods catastrophic?

If so, then were the far longer periods of bitter cold somehow beneficial? Maybe they were for some species, but not for human beings, as even a microcosm within the present cycle shows.

One can almost read the ups and downs as a tug of war between abundance and scarcity, with human civilization as the rope. We ought to be grateful for the summer we’re living in. As was written in the Maunder Minimum:  “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day, Tomorrow will be dying...” Yet rather than praise the gods for our present good fortune, in our selfishness we disparage it, expecting better, and even teach children to fear it. Read more here.

Green scientists have been accused of overstating the dangers of climate change by researchers who found that the number of people killed each year by weather-related disasters is falling. Their report suggests that a central plank in the global warming argument – that it will result in a big increase in deaths from weather-related disasters – is undermined by the facts. It shows deaths in such disasters peaked in the 1920s and have been declining ever since.

Average annual deaths from weather-related events in the period 1990-2006 – considered by scientists to be when global warming has been most intense – were down by 87% on the 1900-89 average. The mortality rate from catastrophes, measured in deaths per million people, dropped by 93%.  The report by the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, a grouping of 41 mainly free-market bodies, comes on the eve of an international meeting on climate change in Bali. Read more here.

After years of warmer-than-normal winters that spurred constant talk of global warming, winter this year is expected to be the coldest in almost 15 years and should remind everyone of what real Canadian cold feels like, Environment Canada said Friday. With the exception of only small pockets of northern Canada and southwestern Ontario, this December through February is forecast to be one of the harshest winters in recent memory across the country, said senior climatologist David Phillips.

“It is somewhat remarkable that we’re seeing the same situation from coast to coast to almost coast - from Vancouver Island to Bonavista, Nfld., we’re showing the country as being colder than normal,” Phillips said. “The last time Canada had a significantly cold winter was back in 1994, more than a decade ago, and this may very well rival that one in terms of coldness.” Phillips said the forecast for cold weather is being triggered in part by La Nina, a period of lower than normal temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.  See more here.

When Nobel laureate Albert Gore, Jr. collects his Peace Prize in Oslo on December 10, he should tell the gathered Norwegians exactly what he meant when he remarked about global warming:  “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are,” Gore said in the May 9, 2006 Grist Magazine. “Over-representation?” Is that anything like misrepresentation?  Gore’s approach infects the debate and even the methodology of so-called “global warming.” From the former vice-president to unseen academics, some who clamor for statist answers to this alleged climate crisis employ dodgy measurement techniques, while others embrace hype and fear-mongering to promote massive government intervention to combat an entirely questionable challenge. Worse yet, this applies to reputedly objective researchers, not just opinionated activists.

U.C. Santa Barbara emeritus professor Daniel Botkin recently lamented in the Wall Street Journal that some of his warming-oriented colleagues believe “the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate…‘Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?’ one said to me recently.”

Oslo’s applause notwithstanding, egregious errors, distortions, and lies have no place in what is supposedly unbiased scientific inquiry regarding one of Earth’s most controversial questions. Read more here.

Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

When the international global warming alarm-ocracy gathers for its annual convention on the balmy island of Bali next week, is there any chance that the delegates will look up at the big yellow ball in the sky and ask, “Could it be the Sun, stupid?” New research suggests that would be a great question for them to consider. A recent study from the Journal of Geophysical Research (November 2007) reports that the sun may have contributed 50 percent or more of the global warming thought to have occurred since 1900.

Researchers from Duke University and the U.S. Army Research Office report that climate appears to be insensitive to solar variation if you accept the global temperature trend for the past 1,000 years as represented by the so-called “hockey stick” graph — which claims to show essentially unchanging temperatures between from 1000 to 1900 and then a sharp uptick from 1900 to the present. But the hockey stick-graph has been relegated to the ash heap of global warming history. Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer mentions the graph in its reports. The researchers instead used a temperature reconstruction developed by Stockholm University researcher Ander Moberg and others that shows more variation in pre-industrial temperatures. Using Moberg’s reconstruction, the researchers found that “the climate is very sensitive to solar changes and a significant fraction of the global warming that occurred during the last century should be solar induced.” The researchers conclude that the current large-scale computer models — which, by the way, don’t work as they don’t even accurately reproduce historical temperature trends — could be significantly improved by adding sun-climate coupling mechanisms. Unfortunately, the reconsideration of the climate models isn’t on the agenda at Bali.

If sunspot activity continues to be so markedly low, then we should prepare for the possibility of a significant global cooling trend that could reduce agricultural yields and bring on the sort of food shortages that occurred during the Little Ice Age. Read more about this and much more here.

James E. Hansen of NASA, brushing off coal-industry criticisms but acknowledging the need to be sensitive to people still haunted by the Holocaust, has elaborated on what he meant when he recently described continued coal burning as akin to sending untold species to their destruction in “death trains” and crematoria. He posted a long note on the matter, titled “Averting Our Eyes on his Columbia University home page tonight.
I asked if we could publish excerpts. “I prefer that you post it in toto,” he said in an e-mail message. “Somehow I have trouble with things out of context. Also my aim is to educate on the broader problem, not just the narrow things that seem to get picked up on.”

Dr. Hansen, like many who commented on Dot Earth after I wrote about his statements, insists that the parallels hold between the denial and passivity that allowed a human cataclysm to sweep Europe in plain sight and the denial and inaction now as the world prepares to build hundreds of conventional coal-burning power plants. In his recent statements and the new one, he warns that the tens of billions of tons of resulting emissions of carbon dioxide, if not captured and stored, will disrupt climate patterns, ecosystems and sea levels that have been remarkably stable through most of modern human history. The result will be an end to “creation” as we have grown to love it, he says. Read more here.

The case for anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW) is getting weaker and weaker, not “stronger and stronger and stronger” as Dr. John Stone of the IPCC’s Working Group II told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this month.  To date, no convincing evidence for AGW has been discovered. And recent global climate behaviour is not consistent with AGW model predictions. Mean global temperature has not again reached the high it did in 1998 (an El Nino year) and it has been stable for the last 6 years despite an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of by 4% since 1998.  Global temperature has not increased since 1998 because, while the northern hemisphere has warmed, the southern hemisphere has cooled. Global warming was supposed to actually be global, not hemispheric.

In science, an hypothesis that something has changed is merely a speculation unless evidence for the change exists. The fact that global climate shows no unprecedented changes recently means that there is no meaningful evidence that anthropogenic activity has had, or is having a detectable effect on natural changes to global climate. Hence, assertion of AGW is mere speculation. Read more here.

Tom Harris is an Ottawa-based mechanical engineer and Executive Director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (http://www.nrsp.com). Dr. Richard Courtney is a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant, IPCC expert reviewer, and an ‘allied scientist’ to NRSP.

The IPCC used it (the ‘hockey stick") in its third assessment report. Al Gore used it in his movie. In fact, no graphic has had such a huge effect as the infamous hockeystick produced by Michael Mann, who used tree ring data to allegedly show that the last century’s warming was unprecedented, and the globe had never in 2000 years been this hot.

Small problem. Mann’s manipulation of the statistics has since been discredited, and the graph dropped out of the IPCC’s fourth report. But the damage has been done. Millions of people now firmly believe the world hasn’t been this hot in recorded history, not even during the Medieval Warm Period. Now a new study says Mann didn’t just get the maths wrong, but could have been using tainted data as well. Ecological modeller Dr Craig Loehle has checked other proxy data, rather than the tree rings he says are unreliable, and comes up with a very different graphic indeed:

Says Loehle: “There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. Data in each series were smoothed with a 30-year running mean. All data were then converted to anomalies by subtracting the mean of each series from that series. The overall mean series was then computed by simple averaging. The mean time series shows quite coherent structure. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.” To sum up. This warming is not unusual. The planet was warmer less than 1000 years ago.  Oh, and see the fall in temperatures since 1998’s high, which so panicked so many people. Read more here.