In June, The New Hampshire Union Leader published a story “At mount (Cannon), talk is about global warming.” This article quoted some participants making statements like “winters with less snow and more rain,” without specific dates and data. It’s difficult to check fuzzy comments like that.

However, there was one data set quoted, “the average winter temperatures in the Northeast have increased 4.4 degrees since 1970,” which was a checkable piece of information. These same erroneous data were quoted in the Keene Sentinel last August, but in the context of a 4.4 degree increase in winter temperatures in New England. The Sentinel published my response stating that the actual change in winter temperature in New England, based on all 11 first-order National Weather Service stations in New England, from the early 1970s to the early 2000s, was a whopping two tenths of one degree!

A more interesting argument heard in New Hampshire is that the ski areas and the maple syrup industries are hurting because of global warming. Using skis and syrup to make the case that the temperature in New Hampshire has warmed substantially is disingenuous because the actual temperature data for New Hampshire are available. Why would you use ski and syrup data to measure temperature when the temperature data are easy to find?  You could suspect that anyone using the ski and syrup data, rather than the temperature data, has already looked at the actual temperature data and found what I found, little or no warming, so they turned to skis and syrup. Interesting!

Finally, for those of you old enough to read in the 1970s, there was a lot of hysteria back then about the global temperature. The same “if we don’t act promptly, in 10 years it will be too late” statements were published, on the covers of reputable papers and magazines, by many of the same “scientists,” and for many of the same base motives. The only difference between the 1970s and now was that the disaster that was just around the corner was global cooling!

How times change, while people don’t.  Is it global warming, political warming or globaloney?

Read full article here.

Snow on the Dandenongs and the heaviest falls on Mt Buller for seven years provide further proof of “Climate Change”, if not of global warming. Keeping that distinction in mind is a precondition for not being swindled.

A second line of defence against mumbo-jumbo is to recall that the philosopher Karl Popper promoted falsifiability as essential to the logic of scientific enquiry. He reasoned that any hypothesis which is so structured as to be incapable of refutation is pseudo-science. The “Climate-Change” band trumpets all data about rising temperatures as evidence to buttress their hypothesis. However, not so long ago they were perplexed by inconvenient truths such as the occasional severe winter. On the face of it, such cold snaps surely count against global warming? This is where the “Extreme Event” comes in handy.

The “Climate-Change” faithful now have the power to levitate above the embarrassment of awkward evidence. To deal with exceptions, they have conceived the metaphysical category of the “Extreme Event”. The “Extreme Event” is a device for ruling out the very possibility of contrary evidence and, thus, for denying the prospect of Popperian falsification.

The “Climate Change” sophists proceed thus: the anthropogenically-enhanced greenhouse effect does more than push up average temperatures. It also increases instability. So, while a denser greenhouse mostly makes the planet hotter/drier, it will also make it colder/wetter in some places at certain times.

If all swings in the weather are worshipped as manifestations of “Climate Change”, that hypothesis is elevated above the realm of rational enquiry. Read whole blog here.

I don’t know if you saw the articles over the weekend about a man by the name of Lewis Pugh who supposedly swam in 28 degree water at the North Pole to bring attention to global warming. This article from the Daily Mail states: The 36-year-old Londoner spent almost 19 minutes at minus 1.8C as he front crawled for a full kilometre - more than half a mile in the coldest water a human has ever swum.

The article does say that ” Only a few seconds in the icy depths would be enough to kill most mere mortals”. This man was in the water for almost 19 minutes wearing nothing but a speedo! Is that possible? And take a look at the next picture. I have never been to the North Pole but is it possible to see the curve of the horizon there? Doesn’t this picture look faked? Perhaps there is a camera lense that would produce this effect. I’d be interested in hearing comments from others on this.

If the event really did happen then I am very impressed with his feat but I am not sure why this would bring attention to global warming. As this article states, it is not unusual for there to be open water at the North Pole in the summer–global warming or not. This fact, of course, never made it into the news stories.

Excerpt from the interview:

I think that there has been friendly as well as unfriendly brainwashing taking place. And when I say friendly and unfriendly, I’m talking about decades of extremist views that have now achieved mainstream acceptance. And the No. 1 item among those affecting current oil politics in Washington is the boogeyman, also known as global warming.

I don’t accept it as established fact, nor do I accept that it would be caused by petroleum consumption, nor do I accept that the human species should not affect its environment. So even if it were someday to be shown to have some small effect on the environment, I see no crime. In fact, taking into account the many, many millions of people around the world that envy our way of life, it would seem more humanitarian to wish them the kind of plentiful petroleum products and vehicles ... that we enjoy ... to lift themselves out of [a] backward, poor way of life.

See the whole interview here.

By Tim Blair, Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2007

LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we’ve horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we’re still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn’t happening, or that we’re causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it nvolves an entire freakin’ continent’s weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month. No such foolishness will be indulged in here. Sadly, those who believe in global warming - and who would compel us also to believe - aren’t similarly constrained. A few hot days are all they ever need to get the global warming bandwagon rolling; evidently it’s solar powered. Here, for example, is an Australian Associated Press report on May’s weather, which in places was a little warmer than usual: “Climate change gave much of Australia’s drought-stricken east coast its warmest May on record, weather experts say. “Global warming and an absence of significant cold changes had driven temperatures well above the monthly average, said meteorologist Matt Pearce. According to Mr Pearce, May’s temperatures were “yet another sign of the widespread climate change that we are seeing unfold across the globe.”

If that’s the case, shouldn’t June’s cold weather - coldest since 1950, remember - be a sign that widespread climate change isn’t unfolding across the globe? We’re using the same data here; one month’s weather. And, in fact, the June sample is Australia-wide while May only highlights the east coast. Fear the dawn of a great “coldening”!

But climate change is like Michael Moore’s tracksuit - it can fit anyone. In 2005, Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault helpfully explained: “Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with.” Read more of this story here.

By the end of this century, 100-year floods could hit New York City every 10 years, Long Island lobsters could disappear and New York apples could be hard to come by if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released yesterday by a group of scientists and economists.

“The Northeast can anticipate substantial — and often unwelcome or dangerous — changes during the rest of this century,” concluded the report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which examined the impact of global warming on the region. “The very character of the Northeast is at stake.”

The report, which covers nine states, is the product of a two-year collaboration between the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, and a team of several dozen independent scientists and economists. For full story go here.

Icecap Editor’s Note: This radical group looked at three climate models, chose the most extreme and asked scientists to evaluate what could happen if the forecasts were right. In that way, an advocacy group, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a name that implies they are a credible scientific organization can make dire predictions that have the ring of having strong scientific support. Their projections are far more extreme than the IPCC. My suggestion is that you go to their site, download their report and use it to start your fire in the fireplace when it is really cold this winter.

Conservative criticism of the Live Earth coverage on Saturday by NBC and its sibling cable networks began rising Tuesday, with many commentators describing it as free political propaganda for Al Gore. In an editorial, Investor’s Business Daily suggested that the Live Earth broadcasts might have represented “the largest in-kind political contribution.” The newspaper also suggested that NBC’s parent, General Electric, might have its own ulterior motives for boosting the Live Earth message on global warming. GE, it said, “stands to make a wad of cash from selling alternative energy products from wind turbines to solar panels to those compact fluorescent bulbs containing mercury. So when Gore prances on stage to demand we stop building coal-fired plants, that’s music to GE’s corporate ears.”

The conservative Media Research Center railed at NBC reporter Ann Curry for asking Gore whether he would run for president, “if you become convinced that without you there will not be the political will in the White House to fight global warming to the level that is required.” On the NewsBusters blog, Lynn Davidson commented, “There should be more questions about Gore-apalooza and the problems involved with a network literally giving a stage to an issue that, despite the shrill desperate claims otherwise, is one which is both political and not settled.” And in the Washington Post, even media columnist Howard Kurtz, who could hardly be pegged as a conservative, asked, “Wasn’t NBC, whose news division covers the debate over climate change, providing a huge platform for advocates on one side of a contentious issue? And isn’t the network helping a prominent Democrat ... raise money? See story here.

The airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle and the associated discussion on ABC TV should be a hoot. The ABC has structured the panel to try to get their preferred political position aired. The panel composition will minimise scientific discussion. It contains journalists, political pressure groups and those who will make a quid out of frightening us witless. Three scientists with a more rational view to the doomsday hype were invited to appear on the panel and have now been uninvited as they do not dance to the drumbeat of disaster. There is a VIP section of the audience with loopy-left greens and social commentators.

We have the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS), which was in such a hurry to publish a critique of The Great Global Warming Swindle that it contains schoolboy howlers and a lack of logic intertwined with politics. What makes it even more amusing is that BAMOS did not criticise Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. If this Hollywood fiction film claims to be supported by science, then why did it perpetuate a well-documented scientific fraud? 

There is no panel discussion when the ABC TV religiously promotes the popular political view on global warming. Why is there a panel for an alternative view?

Science is married to evidence, scepticism and dissent. This evidence is from experiment, measurement, observation and calculation. Scientists hotly debate the methods of acquisition of evidence. Once the evidence is validated, a scientific theory is offered as an explanation. This theory must be in accord with all previous validated data and can be changed with new data. Science has no consensus, science is anarchistic as it submits to no authority, and the latest scientific view is only transitory. Science is apolitical, and when it has submitted to political pressure in the past, it has been at great human cost. Noise, political pressure or numbers of converts does not validate a scientific concept. When the president of the Royal Society says the science on human-induced global warming is settled, one is reminded of a previous president who said it was impossible for heavier-than-air machines to fly! Since the beginning of time, climate has always changed. It has warmed and cooled faster than any contemporary change. Nothing happening at present is unusual.

Read more here. Ian Plimer is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide.