This week, TV6 is airing a three-part series on Global Warming (GW), also referred to as “Climate Change.” Meteorologist Nick Kanczuzewski has put together an excellent, balanced look at both sides of the issue and what it means for Upper Michigan. The time constraints imposed by television news will only allow him to survey the topic.  For that reason, I will use this blog to occasionally delve deeper into this controversial subject.

First of all, here is my disclaimer. I do not side with one political party - I am appalled that this branch of science has become so political. My views are counter to the consensus view that “mainstream” media repeatedly bombards us with. That does NOT mean I do not care about the environment.

For many years I kept silent on this issue; no more. The misinformation, exaggeration and alarmist tone to network news stories about GW has, in my opinion, gone over the line from objective journalism to advocacy. The derogatory labels and downright libelous characterization of scientists with views counter to the “consensus” is appalling. 

No matter what you hear or see on the NBC Nightly News or any other major news outlet, there is another, legitimate side to this topic.  And there are renowned scientists in this field who hold counter or “skeptical” views. Read more here.

On May 18, 1980, the once bucolic ice-cream cone shape that defined Mount St. Helens in Washington state disappeared in monstrous blast of ash, rock, gas, and heat. It was one of the most powerful explosions ever witnessed by humans and the force of the blast leveled hundreds of square miles of forestland, devastated wildlife and killed over 50 people.

Almost three decades later, the effects of the eruption are readily apparent to the thousands of visitors to the observation points in the sprawling Mount St. Helens volcanic monument. But time has also muted the effects to some degree. Trees are growing back in some areas, plants have poked up through the ash, animals move through the devastated plains once again.

And inside the volcano, which was once a soft dome of snow but is now a gaping, steaming menace with an unpredictable streak, an unexpected phenomenon is taking place: a glacier is growing. Over the years since the huge eruption, the snowfall has condensed and compacted to form a horseshoe-shaped glacier inside the crater. Researcher Joseph Walder with the U.S. Geological Survey says the shade from the crater wall is allowing the glacier to grow in height by about 15 feet per year. Read more here.

SCARVES and coats can already be seen on the city streets. Warming pumpkin soups are featuring on cafe menus - and skiers everywhere have begun the countdown to winter, when snowmen will fall, unassembled, from heaven.

The ski buzz is upon us and, with the highest peaks of Australia and New Zealand already pulling on their white winter beanies after heavy early snowfalls, expectations are sky-high among the one million Aussie skiers and snowboarders.

The signs have rarely looked so good. A snowy northern ski season has been followed by an early trend towards a winter weather pattern across south-eastern Australia and the Shaky Isles. Heavy snow fell across the mountains in the last days of April, a month that was also the wettest in Sydney in 80 years and the coldest in nine years. Meteorologist James Luffman, of weatherzone.com.au, says of the season ahead: “The seasonal forecast indicates we can expect plenty more snow-bearing systems through the coming winter.”

There’s nothing quite like early snow to set up the season, which gets under way on June 7, sliding on through until the first week of October. Patterns run right through the ski seasons of the past: 1960, 1964 and 1968 were all whopping seasons. So too 2000 and 2004. Now 2008 looms large. Read more here.

Meanwhile the National Climate Centre, seemingly annoyed at the second cold season and early snow disrupting their “global warming”, admonished SKIERS banking on a La Nina-delivered bumper season after the weekend’s falls in Victoria and NSW to find another talisman in this story.

"May we live long and die out” is the unofficial motto of a movement that seeks to improve the Earth’s ecosystem by ensuring that the human species does not survive.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, consists of volunteers who have made active life decisions to remain childless for the benefit of the Earth, thereby preventing the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals.

While no one person takes credit for being the founder, Les U. Knight created its name and is the spokesperson for the movement. “We’ve already exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity for humans by quite a bit,” Knight told WND. “We are using up our resources. The best way to stop it is by not breeding. It’s really the best way because the people we don’t create don’t exist, and so there’s no impact on them.” VHEMT activists believe a smaller population will benefit the Earth by reducing human and environmental catastrophe.

“There is no problem on the planet that would be more easily solved by adding more people,” Knight said. “Everything that we like, including clean air and clean water and wilderness to go and visit, all of those will increase as there become fewer of us.” Knight said the greenest habit humans can have is to prevent creation of another member of the species, reducing humanity’s ecological footprint on the Earth. Read more here.

AUSTRALIAN agricultural output will double over the next 40 years, with climate change predicted to increase, rather than hinder, the level of production. A recent spate of reports forecasting the decline of Australian agriculture because of climate change have greatly exaggerated, and even completely misreported the threat of global warming, according to senior rural industry figures.

In a report published by the Australian Farm Institute, executive director Mick Keogh says agricultural output is projected to improve strongly through to 2050, with a growing global population and increased economic wealth boosting demand for Australian produce. If the sector adapts even modestly, production would increase rather than decrease as a result of climate change, the report says.  Predictions of a 20 per cent drop in farm production by mid-century were cited by Kevin Rudd and Agriculture Minister Tony Burke as justification for Australia’s signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

In fact, Mr Keogh says, if global warming does occur, some areas such as southeast Queensland will receive more rain, and as a result will greatly benefit. Recent research has shown increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lifts plant production by up to 30 per cent in a phenomenon known as carbon fertilisation. Mr Keogh, a well-respected industry figure, said much of the media reporting on the recent ABARE report Climate Change: Impacts On Australian Agriculture, was so misleading it risked eroding industry confidence in public research agencies. “The reporting claimed that agriculture would be absolutely devastated, when that is not what the research showed at all,” he said. “For a start the media consistently misreported the research results as a future reduction in agricultural output, rather than a slowing of future rates of growth in output.” He said the ABARE report chose a series of highly unlikely worst-case climate change scenarios and then projected them over a long period of time. Read more here.

Contrary to what Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio say, the global warming debate is not over. Hysterical warnings about flooded coastlines and boiled polar bears remain nothing more than hot-air predictions. Their belief in an approaching apocalypse is based on nothing more than theory and blind faith, when the measures they advocate—the dismantling of capitalist economies and making energy unaffordable for the masses—demand hard evidence.

Well, the latest data on climate change is in and, not surprisingly, it favors the “deniers.” The United Nations World Meteorological Organization, the body that provides climate models to the U.N.’s alarmist global warming panel, reported last week that not only have world temperatures remained stable for the past decade, but that global average temperatures for 2008 will be cooler than those of 2007. Call us crazy, but that has to make it hard to sell the public on giving up their cars and detached homes in favor of mass transit and high-rise tenements.

The global warming gurus assure us that a decade without, you know, global warming, has a perfectly rational explanation, and that humanity’s wasteful standard of living is still a sure bet to replace Canadian winters with Las Vegas summers by the end of the century. The Pacific Ocean’s La Nina current, a cooler-than-normal expanse of water, is responsible for milder temperatures in the normally balmy equatorial region. China and West Asia have cooled off as well, the WMO reported. But as Investor’s Business Daily wrote in a Friday editorial: “Why can’t the Pacific’s El Nino current, which played a large part in the warm reading for 1998, simply be seen as a ‘variability’ and not part of a greater warming trend?” Variability is code for “data that don’t support our cause.”

That won’t stop the greens from preaching the gospel of global warming. And it certainly won’t stop their media enablers from reporting it as truth—witness the lack of news reports on the WMO data. But bit by bit, cold, hard, scientific fact is deflating many assertions of the climate change alarmists. Read more here.

You may have wondered why there has been no Congressional effort to actually legislate the “global warming” policies that will supposedly save the planet from itself. For six years, the Democratic minority indulged in often nasty rhetoric, with the gist being: We know the problem. We know the solution. Your hearings are a delaying tactic. We. Must. Act. Now!

After winning the majority, Dems muttered for a while about how that mean George Bush would just veto their legi-salvation anyway: Why bother? We’ll just work for a bigger majority - and the White House. Though, as I have noted on Planet Gore before, Bush had threatened no veto - and on those occasions since January 2007 when he did threaten a veto, in other policy contexts, the Dems typically took it as a challenge to pass something. So there seemed to be something missing from their political calculation, or at least their public rhetoric.

Today’s E&E Daily (subscription required) has a hilarious apologia, “Sponsors lower expectations for Lieberman-Warner bill,” offering a walk-through of the phenomenon afflicting our crusaders. Here as in pretty much every country in the world (posturing notwithstanding), global warming is such a grave threat that other people need to “do something.” Given the inescapable price tag, lawmakers looked and discovered that anything they propose would actually be doing nothing - besides harming state economies. And if forced to choose, it seems they would prefer it be other states’ economies that are harmed. 

That mean George Bush and those nasty filibustering Republicans are blocking a climate bailout. Or, maybe not so much. As my CEI colleague Myron Ebell characterizes this: thieves fall out when it comes time to split up the loot. Read more here.

Research done by the U.S. Department of the Interior to determine if global warming threatens the polar bear population is so flawed that it cannot be used to justify listing the polar bear as an endangered species, according to a study being published later this year in Interfaces, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

On April 30, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ordered the Interior Department to decide by May 15 whether polar bears should be listed under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School says, “To list a species that is currently in good health as an endangered species requires valid forecasts that its population would decline to levels that threaten its viability. In fact, the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions. Assuming these restrictions remain, the most appropriate forecast is to assume that the upward trend would continue for a few years, then level off.  “These studies are meant to inform the US Fish and Wildlife Service about listing the polar bear as endangered. After careful examination, my co-authors and I were unable to find any references to works providing evidence that the forecasting methods used in the reports had been previously validated. In essence, they give no scientific basis for deciding one way or the other about the polar bear.”

Prof. Armstrong and colleagues originally undertook their audit at the request of the State of Alaska. Professor Armstrong is author of Long-Range Forecasting, the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods, and Principles of Forecasting. He is a co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, the International Symposium on Forecasting, and forecastingprinciples.com. The authors examined nine U.S. Geological Survey Administrative Reports. The studies include “Forecasting the Wide-Range Status of Polar Bears at Selected Times in the 21st Century” by Steven C. Amstrup et. al. and “Polar Bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea II: Demography and Population Growth in Relation to Sea Ice Conditions” by Christine M. Hunter et al.

Prof. Armstrong and his colleagues concluded that the most relevant study, Amstrup et al. properly applied only 15% of relevant forecasting principles and that the second study, Hunter et al. only 10%. Further, they write, the Geologic Survey reports do not adequately substantiate the authors’ assumptions about changes to sea ice and polar bears’ ability to adapt that are key to the recommendations. Therefore, the authors write, a key feature of the U.S. Geological Survey reports is not scientifically supported. Read more here.