Today, we are urged to believe that within the next few decades the globe will become intolerably warmer. The world as we know it will be drastically altered unless we act now to reverse our wayward lifestyles, especially our wasteful energy practices. But wait. Aren’t we all just essentially being pressured to believe in a long-range climate forecast? And isn’t this pressure largely being applied by politicians and political organizations no less? Who today would bet serious money on a weather prediction made a month in advance let alone decades ahead? Yet the developed nations of the world are under the gun to invest hundreds of billions of dollars on a climate prophecy when worldwide financial stability is tottering. Doesn’t President Barack Obama have enough global headaches to buffer to worry about a trillion-dollar climate prescription?

Many in the environmental profession have come to an epiphany like the one the late Michael Crichton had - that contemporary environmentalism, with its authoritative, unchallengeable proclamations and rigid tenets, is analogous to organized religion. This environmental religion is headed by politicians (or former politicians) as the high priests and an established political cathedral (read Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

These adored figureheads have selected verses from a collection of scientific data and climate effects to write their global-warming scriptures. Their holy writ includes a reworking of the Book of Revelation with planetary disasters as frightening as those alluded to in the authentic account. Salvation comes from giving the priests control over our daily lives to redeem us from our carbonaceous sins. Penance and indulgence take the form of “offsets” to carbon-spewing offenses like frivolous exotic vacations, meaty outdoor barbecues, incandescent-bulb burning, and driving a Hummer (a mortal sin!).

Not to worry though, there is mercy in environmentalism. For the ability to continue trespasses like economic expansion in industrialized nations while enjoying a guilt-free contemporary lifestyle, the offsets are invoked to spare those in Third World countries from the modern burdens of ominous power plants, dirty cement kilns, egregious chemical factories, heartless pharmaceutical industries, sterile medical clinics, gluttonous harvests and gushing purified water. At least those with guilt-assuaged consciences can relax as they vicariously enjoy the back-to-nature lifestyles of loin-clothed aboriginals foraging for food to feed their gaunt families in a lush rain forest (while annually a million natives worldwide drop dead from malaria alone).

How have we come to universally accept this new religion based on dubious prophecy that condemns so many poor souls to a living hell and will greatly limit the salvation offered by free economies? That’s where the missionaries come in. These missionaries, aka “teachers” and “professors,” have gone out into the fields of the education system to disseminate the depressing gospel that the Earth is forever in big trouble. Thus, with sustained indoctrination from grade school through graduate school, proselytes have been harvested.

No wonder today’s scientists, let alone society, so quickly succumb to any doomed-Earth theory. Our scientific community has been primed to accept that a forecast of calamity for our atmosphere is as good as a reality.

Everyone has been conditioned to believe that an extremely complex climate system is largely controlled by a single simple gas - carbon dioxide - even though the biggest single climate regulator on Earth is most likely water. The global atmospheric temperature is substantially controlled by water in all its forms, as invisible vapor in air, as liquid in oceans and clouds, and as solid ice crystals, snow cover, and glaciers.

Besides, could other uncontrollable factors like variation in incoming solar radiation and cosmic rays, as some atmospheric scientists have proposed, have a dominant influence over climate?

So, before we all surrender to a calamitous climate change scenario, let’s put it into perspective with the very real present-day calamities of mass starvation, disease, ethnic cleansing, potential economic collapses, and the like. With these exceptionally serious challenges at hand and based on the enormous complexity of the Earth-climate system and the relative paucity of knowledge scientists have about the systems operation, we sincerely hope to encourage a return to humility in environmental research and activism and education about our biosphere. We hope politicians and scientists once again embrace the basics of science including the idea that all “theories” consist of assumptions and limitations - and this goes double for “forecasts”! However, we expect our motivational efforts at reformation will just end up getting us burned at the stake (in a carbon-neutral fashion of course) for environmental heresy.

Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and co-author of “Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry” (CRC Press/Lewis Publishers, 2000). Susan T. Cammarata is an independent environmental lawyer practicing in Pittsburgh.

Note there has been little coverage of the inconvenient record snows of the last two years in the mainstream media. See the incredible snows this winter in Austria from the Orlando Sentinel.

So I’m searching through Google News trying to find this story on how Global Warming is making kids nutty with “climate change delusion,” when I follow a link to this story instead. It’s on MSNBC’s website with the title Storm Chaser Believes Global Warming Responsible for Early Activity in Tornado Alley.

The story is about, well, a storm chaser who believes that Global Warming is responsible for the early activity in Tornado Alley.  “Over the past several years, I’ve seen an earlier arrival of spring, particularly in North Texas and Oklahoma,” Lisius said. “March used to be what we considered the start of tornado season here, but February is looking more like March did. It’s not hard to imagine how this story made it into Google’s news summary. Oklahoma suffered a severe outbreak of tornadoes a few days ago and many people were surprised to see the storms in the “safe” month of February, instead of during the springtime. This fits perfectly into the “Global Warming” narrative. There are plenty of experts to scare you into thinking that tornadoes are becoming more severe and numerous due to Global Warming. And there are others who find the whole idea problematic, and I, personally, find them more persuasive.

But Global Warming has become a hack writer’s hook to hang a news story on. I mean, when was the last time you read anything in a newspaper about polar bears or giant, pre-historic snakes that didn’t have to do with Global Warming? It’s such a great hook that a quick search of Google News for “Global Warming” today found this:  Twenty-five thousand and sixty-four stories about Global Warming. That’s more stories than all the stories about Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton combined. 

Anyway...Bottom line if you’re a news writer? Never let a story go by that you can’t somehow slip in a reference to Global Warming. Tornadoes? Global Warming? Well, they fit the narrative that the news writers believe. And any news writer knows how to shape the story to fit the narrative; you slant the story the way you want to slant it, then find the quotes to support the slant. So the news writer contacted some professional storm chaser out in Tornado Alley and got the quotes he needed.  And that’s how a story about tornadoes in Oklahoma became one of the 25,064 stories about Global Warming. It turns out that Global Warming has its own, full-time, no-expense Press Agent—it’s called “The Press.” Only it didn’t happen that way. As I came to the end of the article, I found this: Lisius is founder of Tempest Tours, a company that specializes in storm chasing expeditions. Guests from around the world sign up for tours that typically sell out, a result of the company’s success intercepting tornadoes (90 since 2003). Persons interested in storm chasing with Tempest Tours can register on-line at the company’s web site.  Photos available for use with this press release or upon request. What the hell? This isn’t a news story at all. This article on Google “News” and MSNBC “News” is just a raw, unedited press release shoved onto the Internet to give publicity to a guy and his storm chasing tour. It’s an advertisement. A free advertisement.

The lazy hack news writers at MSNBC didn’t have to lift a Cheetos-stained finger to get this Global Warming “news” out into the world. It came to them.  It’s no wonder the papers are filled with stories about Global Warming—They write themselves.

The blackboard in Prof. Nir Shaviv’s office in the Department of Physics at Hebrew University is covered with equations and graphs. He’s hunched over the computer, searching for another illustration, another study that will underscore the subject of our talk: the effect of cosmic rays on the earth’s warming.

Shaviv is the preeminent Israeli scholar among a handful (no many hundreds of thousands) throughout the world who believe that human beings are not responsible for global warming. The consequences of global warming were portrayed in Al Gore’s successful 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which presents a frightening scenario to which one can hardly remain indifferent: giant ice caps melting, vast areas of human settlement covered by seas that overflow their banks, fierce hurricanes, new strains of bacteria, plagues and death.

Shaviv refuses to get worked up: “The hysteria surrounding the concept of ‘global warming’ will fade over the years,” he says. “People will see that the apocalyptic forecasts are not coming true. Today there is no fingerprint attesting that carbon dioxide emission causes a rise in temperature. A Grad missile that falls in Sderot should be more cause for concern.” Last Wednesday, Shaviv was featured in a documentary broadcast on Channel 8, “The Cloud Mystery,” alongside Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, a physicist whose pioneering experiments conducted in Copenhagen revealed how changes on the sun’s surface and cosmic rays are what affect climate, and not the polluting gases from manmade sources.

A few months from now, Am Oved will be publishing a Hebrew translation of Svensmark’s book “The Chilling Stars,” which was the basis for the film (and was written with Nigel Calder, former editor of the journal New Scientist). Several important chapters are devoted to Shaviv’s work, and as the book’s scientific editor, the final drafts of the translation are currently on the desk in his office. Shaviv, 36, is an associate professor at the Hebrew University, in the Racah Institute of Physics, where he lectures on star formation and high energies.

In 2002, the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review Letters published Shaviv’s article, “Cosmic Ray Diffusion from the Galactic Spiral Arms, Iron Meteorites, and a Possible Climatic Connection.” The article was selected by the scientific magazine Discover as one of the year’s 100 most important discoveries. In the article, Shaviv proposed the hypothesis that the earth’s crossing of the spiral arms of the Milky Way is the cause of the ice ages the planet has experienced. 

Read much more here about this very interesting scientist who sort of backdoored into climate change issue while researching a colleague’s query about how supernovae (the explosion of massive stars) affect the earth. He will be one of the featured scientists at this years ICCC in New York City, March 8-10.

If the debate over climate change is closed, why is John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, still trying to prove it’s all a scam? Well over a quarter-million weathercasts - that’s the ballpark figure the 74-year-old founding father of the Weather Channel guesses he’s probably performed in his 55 years in the business. Today, as for the past 15 years, he’s chalked up another weathercast like it’s his job, because it is. This, he tells me, is the best time of his career.

Which seems odd, because in the past few years, he’s admittedly become mad as hell. Coleman is angry because he believes we have been brainwashed into thinking we’re ruining our own planet. He wants to let us off the hook, and give us some good news for a change, because, you see, John Coleman says that climate change is a scam.

If you consume mainstream media, odds are you’re not hearing much debate about climate change these days. We’re told the debate is effectively over. Scientists say so, too. It’s our consumption that continues to ruin our planet’s environmental health, so there’s no longer time to debate- it’s time to act. Every time we do anything, like flip on a light switch or charge an iPod or turn on the A/C, we’re contributing to the release of greenhouse gases, and so the oceans rise and that’s a problem for the polar bears and, well, you know - something like that. It may be difficult to explain, but we know the state of the environment is bad. Most recently, in fact, we were told that the effects of man-made climate change are all but irreversible.

Coleman’s still got a steady gig, and he doesn’t feel he personally has much to lose in allowing himself to be one of the most prominent climate-change naysayers. He’s already lost his baby - the Weather Channel - and, he says, TWC is a perpetrator of the scam along with all the other mainstream media organizations. Coleman doesn’t like what his baby has grown into. When I ask him about the current product, he doesn’t skip a beat. “The Weather Channel is terrible. Pathetic.”

What “they” are talking about, and we have heard much about is that climate change is one of greatest challenges we face in our lifetime and that humankind is generally destroying everything imaginable involving air, water, and land. John Coleman says it’s perpetrated by the media who loves it some Gore. “You’ve got Al Gore. You’ve got the environmentalists. And then all the networks come aboard, because they love gloom and doom, the-end-is-near,” he says. “From Y2K to killer bees - God, give us something to tell people their lives are coming to an end - cancer scare, HIV, whatever we’ve got - let’s go, Man, scare the hell out of people,” he says. “This is awful. Shame on them, scaring people. That’s deplorable.”

According to Coleman, the media is biased and sloppy and perpetuates the climate change myth. “Has Larry King called me? Oh no. Has 60 Minutes been interested in our side of the story? Oh no. 20/20? Oh no. Coleman continues: “I’ve been totally ignored by ABC, NBC, CBS - put down by CNN.” He has been interviewed by FOX News and also by Glenn Beck, who, he says, “used me as part of his rant.”

Coleman saw An Inconvenient Truth on DVD and he says he made it all the way through, but “not without screaming.” Gore’s film won two Oscars - one for best documentary - and in October, 2007, Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize. ("I have a friend who calls the Nobel Peace Prize the Liberal of the Year Award,” Coleman tells me.) Coleman seethed. Soon thereafter, he posted a missive on KUSI.com’s “Coleman’s Corner.”

“So I get indignant and I write that blog and throw it on the website,” he says. “That’s kind of totally absorbed my life since.” Read more here. See Coleman’s Corner here.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of Earth’s most impoverished regions. Over 90% of its people still lack electricity, running water, proper sanitation and decent housing. Malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and intestinal diseases kill millions every year. Life expectancy is appalling, and falling. And yet UN officials, European politicians, environmentalist groups and even African authorities insist that global warming is the gravest threat facing the continent. They claim there is no longer any debate over human-caused global warming - but ignore thousands of scientists who say human CO2 emissions are not the primary cause of climate changes, there is no evidence that future warming will be catastrophic, and computer models do not provide valid projections or “scenarios” for the future.

Warming alarmists use the “specter of climate change” to justify inhumane policies and shift the blame for problems that could be solved with the very technologies they oppose. Past colonialism sought to develop mining, forestry and agriculture, and bring better government and healthcare practices to Africa. Eco-colonialism keeps Africans “traditional” and “indigenous”, by insisting that modern technologies are harmful and not “sustainable” in Africa.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity could power homes, offices, factories, schools and hospitals, create jobs, bring clean running water, and generate health and prosperity. But Rainforest Action Network and other pressure groups oppose coal and natural gas electricity generation on the grounds of climate change, and hydroelectric and nuclear power for other ideological reasons. They promote wind turbines and solar panels that provide electricity unreliably and in amounts too small to meet any but the most rudimentary needs.

Biotechnology could produce bumper crops that overcome droughts, floods, insects, viruses, and even global warming and cooling. But Greenpeace and Sierra Club oppose this precision hybrid-making technology, and instead promote land and labor-intensive subsistence farming. DDT and insecticides could slash malaria rates that al Gore and other climate alarmists falsely claim are rising because of global warming. But Pesticide Action Network and other activists stridently oppose their use, and the European Parliament recently imposed new pesticide restrictions that will further restrict African access to life-saving chemicals.

So this is where radical climate change alarmism has taken us. When the health of Planet Earth is at stake, human life means little - even if the “disaster” are nothing more than worst-case scenarios conjured up by computer models, headline writers, Hollywood, and professional doomsayers like Gore, Hansen and NOAA alarmist-in-chief Susan Solomon.

“Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned,” British arch-environmentalist George Monbiot lectured readers of The Guardian, in a typically hysteria-laced column. One has to wonder if he would apply the same standard to eco-colonialist executives who continue to perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and death in the name of preventing “global warming disasters” that fewer and fewer respectable scientists still believe are caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s time to address Africa’s real problems and replace lethal eco-colonialism with fact-based science and humane public policies. Read more here.

It is one thing to be mistaken when developing and administering government programs. It is another to be nuts. “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired plants are factories of death.”

Would someone please get the net and throw it over Dr. James Hansen, the Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? The above is a direct quote. Recently, Dr. Hansen, the man who has the dubious distinction of predicting back in 1988 to a congressional committee that we were all going to die from global warming, had an insane diatribe published in The Guardian, a liberal newspaper published in Great Britain.

“A year ago, I wrote to Gordon Brown asking him to place a moratorium on new coal-fired plants in Britain,” wrote Dr. Hansen. “I have asked the same of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, and other leaders. The reason is this - coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”

On January 24, I posted a commentary, ”Coal, Glorious Coal”, on the website of The National Anxiety Center, my clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public policy and opinion. You can read it here. I noted that Stephen Chu, the Secretary of Energy, is on record saying, “Coal is my worst nightmare” and pointed out that coal provides over 50% of all the electricity in the nation. At least Dr. Chu isn’t writing to the leaders of Europe telling them that the entire human race is doomed if they don’t shut down all the coal-fired plants producing electricity. Well, not yet. But Dr. Hansen is.

By contrast, Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. is the former director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and an associate professor of environmental studies. He is a scientist with the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Together with Radford Byerly, Jr, he was the editor of ”Prediction: Science, Decision Making, and the Future of Nature” published in 2000. His PhD is in political science.

“Hansen’s argument includes,” noted Dr. Pielke, “his complaint that policy makers have not followed his advice, which apparently, Hansen believes should take precedent over all other views. Indeed, he dismisses the views of the public as being too poorly informed, too distracted or unsophisticated to contribute to decision making on the climate issue.”

Meanwhile, poll after poll, indicates that the public has concluded in ever growing numbers that global warming is pure hogwash. I recently wrote about a paper by a leading authority on “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” who concluded that President Obama gives ample evidence of it. One might conclude that Dr. Hansen has the same problem. Indeed, Dr. Pielke said that Hansen’s commentary “swerves from scientific authoritarianism to megalomania.” Anyone who can write that “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet” is surely irrational and in need of the same sequestration that Hansen wants for carbon dioxide.

The problem for the rest of us is that people like Dr. Hansen, Secretary Chu, and all of President Obama’s science and environmental advisers hold genuinely crazy ideas about coal, oil, solar and wind energy, biofuels, and global warming that will be implemented as government policy and law.

It is worth noting that perhaps the looniest of the whole bunch, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, recently said, “The new Administration is stopping the headlong rush to open offshore areas of drilling”, commending Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar for “wisely initiating a review of the potential that offshore renewable energy projects can proceed in an environmentally-responsible manner.” In other words, the 85% of the nation’s continental coast will continue to remain unexplored and untapped for the billions of barrels of oil and natural gas it is estimated to contain.

Try to square this up with the Administration’s claim that it wants America to become more “energy independent.” You can’t because the two statements are diametrically opposed. That’s why only crazy people can keep two such opposing ideas in their heads at the same time. Meanwhile, absolutely nothing stopped the “headlong rush” to pass the most massive spending bill in the history of the nation with Speaker Pelosi leading the charge along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This isn’t the way our government is supposed to function. This is the real threat to the lives and welfare of all Americans.

See also this compilation of recent articles about James Hansen compiled by Marc Morano here.

Hotshot greens caught wasting home heat. A survey of the homes of top environmentalists has found they leak energy.

Steven Swinford and Jonathan Leake. They may shout their green credentials from the rooftops, but some of Britain’s most prominent environmental champions are living in homes that produce up to half a ton of excess carbon dioxide a year. An audit of properties, measuring heat loss, has revealed that Chris Martin, the pop star, Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and Sir David Attenborough, the broadcaster, are among those who reside in homes that are “leaking” energy. Some lack even the most basic energy saving measures such as cavity wall insulation and double glazing. Thermal images of the residences of 10 high-profile green campaigners found that their heat loss was either worse or no better than that found in the average family home.

Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat energy and climate change spokesman, owned the least energy-efficient property. He bought his £150,000 flat in Southwark, south London, 25 years ago but has failed to fit it with any significant insulation. Only last week Hughes unveiled plans to make every home in Britain energy efficient within the next decade. He could start with his own flat. According to IRT Surveys, which analysed the thermal images for The Sunday Times, an estimated 1,812 kilowatt hours of heat a year seeps out through the walls and windows. The extra heating needed to make up for this loss produces 471kg of CO2 This weekend Hughes said he was planning to move. “I’m conscious that the house does need some more work to be as well insulated as possible,” he said. “If I stay, it will have a full survey and anything that’s necessary. In theory it doesn’t waste much energy because for large parts of the day there’s nobody there.”

The IRT analysis assumes the property is in use the whole year round. However, Steve Howard of the Climate Group, which advises businesses and
governments about reducing emissions, said: “Even a poorly paid MP can afford cavity wall insulation - it will pay for itself in three years. It’s a no-brainer.”

Johnson is a late convert to the environmental cause and has sought to enhance his reputation by offering Londoners discounted home insulation. However, his five-bedroom Victorian house in Islington, north London, loses 1,388kWh of energy a year - equivalent to - largely because of “excessive heat loss” around 360kg of CO2 the upper and lower windows.

Jenny Jones, a Green party London assembly member, said: “It’s all very well to advise the rest of London how to behave, but if you’re going to be credible you’ve got to do it yourself. He has to put his own house in order."A source close to Johnson claimed that energy saving measures would be too costly to implement in such an old property, which has neither a loft nor cavities in the walls. The mayor also plans to move soon.

Experts say having a period property is no excuse and suggest the internal cladding of walls, draught-proofing and solar water heaters as ways of improving energy efficiency. Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, and his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress, have both championed green issues. Paltrow backed the American “Act Green” energy conservation campaign, while Martin tried to offset CO2 emissions produced by his band’s second album by planting a forest of mango trees in India. Yet the couple’s 2.5m pound home in Belsize Park, north London, wastes 1,020kWh of heat a year. A spokesman for Martin refused to comment.

Attenborough, the veteran naturalist and broadcaster, has lived in the same Georgian villa in Richmond, southwest London, for 40 years. Despite the installation of new boilers and insulation of the roof, the windows remain single-glazed because the property is in a conservation area. As a result, it loses 1,107kWh of energy a year. “I’m talking to people about solar panels,” Attenborough said. “The property is 200 years old so we are limited [in what we can do].”

Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, who denounced flying as ‘a symptom of sin” two years ago, lives at the Old Deanery near St Paul’s Cathedral. The property loses 518kWh and burns 134kg of CO2 a year in extra heating. A spokesman for the bishop said the grade I listed building had recently undergone an environmental audit and further improvements would be made to reduce heat loss.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace, admitted that he had also struggled to make his 500,000 pound London home more energy efficient because of its age. To compensate, he has installed draught-proofing and solar panels. He also drives an electric car and no longer flies when going on holiday. Sauven is considering taking out a second mortgage to install double glazing, which costs more in a conservation area.

The audit, using a camera provided by Flir, which makes thermal imaging equipment, found Hilary Benn, the environment minister, Ed Miliband, the climate change minister, and David Cameron, the Tory leader, had the most energy efficient of the 10 properties. Read more here.

First this news: The Ap Index continues to fall. While the January 2009 data is not out yet, the December 2008 data is and is an Ap value of 2 according to SWPC. While this number may be lower than other sources (Leif will fill us in I’m sure), I’m plotting it for consistency since I’ve been following the SWPC data set for well over a year now.

I’ve pointed out several times the incident of the abrupt and sustained lowering of the Ap Index which occurred in October 2005. The sun has been running at a lower plateau of the Ap index after that event and has not recovered. It is an anomaly worth investigating.

From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little Ap magnetic activity there has been since. Here’s a graph from December 2008 showing the step in October 2005:

See larger image here.

Additionally David Archibald writes with a new idea on how to use the Ap Index to predict the maximum amplitude. See below. In late January, I contributed a post predicting that the Ap Index would have a minimum of 3 in late 2009.  There is a good correlation between the aa Index at minimum and the amplitude of the following solar cycle.  This also holds for the Ap Index:

See larger image here.

The Ap prediction results in a prediction of maximum amplitude for Solar Cycle 24 of 25.  This would be the lowest result since the late 17th century. See post and comments here.

Icecap Note: Solar cycle length is still not determined, but it is at least 12.4 years. The cycles 20-23 look a lot like cycles 1 to 4. This would make it similar to the late 1700s as Anthony noted.

Larger image here