The mainstream media continues to write urgently about global warming. Last month NEWSWEEK asked on its cover which candidate will be the most green. On Sunday the New York Times Magazine produced a special issue on how to reduce your carbon footprint-from changing your light bulbs to walking more to eating “slow food.” Any reader of old-line mainstream media-the traditional news source of the upper middle class-would think that the country is rallying to a crisis.

But the disconnect persists. National polls show that the environment ranks fairly low as an issue that moves voters. In the Pennsylvania primary global warming was such a peripheral issue that exit pollsters did not even bother to measure voter attitudes toward it. Many younger voters wish the candidates would talk more about global warming. But most voters worry more about jobs and keeping fuel cheap. Aside from speaking in broad generalities and making vague promises, the candidates steer away from involved debate on global warming. (Enabled, it should be said, by political reporters. Of the more than 3,000 questions asked in the more than 20 presidential debates, fewer than 10 mentioned global warming.)

There is an enormous class divide on the subject. The chattering classes obsess about greenhouse emissions. The rest of the country, certainly the older and less well-off voters, can’t be bothered. Slow food to most people means that the waitress at the local IHOP is falling behind. The politicians duck the issue, or so it seems. It may be, though, that the politicians know something they are not saying-and that the green-conscious upper classes do not wish to confront. Making a serious dent in global warming would be hugely costly. Read more here.

Two stories on two continents blamed climate change and global warming for damaging cold. In this story in the Peruvian Times, climate change is said too be wrecking havoc in Peru’s southern altiplano, where the arrival of freezing temperatures since March, almost three months earlier than usual, have killed more than a dozen people. The extreme cold has claimed the lives of 16 people so far in Puno, and 5,053 others are suffering from respiratory ailments, most of them children under 5, Elsa Paredes, of Puno’s Regional Health Institute, told Enlace Nacional. In Puno, rain has destroyed harvested potatoes and freezing temperatures as low as -13.5 C (8F) have destroyed more than 50% of the quinoa crops, a staple food.

Meanwhile in this story in the Scotsman, Jerome Starkey reports the faltering British efforts to tackle Afghanistan’s poppy crop have found an unlikely ally - in the weather. Freak winter weather linked to global warming is expected to decimate parts of the country’s opium harvest. Scientists believe freezing temperatures followed by late rains and a possible drought could slash this year’s yields. Some farmers could suffer up to 50 per cent losses. The fierce cold - which claimed hundreds of lives across Afghanistan - is thought to have stopped millions of poppy seeds from germinating, while late rains and a meagre snow melt following an unusually low snowfall have stunted many of the plants that survived. One expert said: “It was too cold in some areas for the seeds to come alive. Between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the seeds may not have germinated.”

So you see, no matter what extreme happens, reporters are conditioned to blame global warming and you and I for the extremes. Just remember for every record broken, it is replacing another extreme in the past, recently the more distant past long before we had SUVs (even cars) and power plants.

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity. What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770. It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers. It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon. The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Read more here

Organizations spearheaded by former Vice President Al Gore have launched an advertising campaign in movie theaters to inform audiences of the measures they can take in their everyday lives to mitigate the “climate crisis.” As part of a deal with the movie advertisement agency ScreenVision, the Alliance for Climate Protection—founded by Gore in 2006—is airing advertisements, conversations about conservation, and a short animated feature called “Sky is Falling” at 7,000 theater screens nationwide. The pre-show bundle also includes an animated feature from Current TV—the cable news channel also founded by the former vice president.

The segment, entitled “Sky is Falling,” says the United States in 2006 produced 5.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the weight-equivalent of 1.2 million elephants. As animated elephants fall from the sky, causing terror in the city below, the animated video says, “It’s time to stop ignoring the 1.2 million elephants in the room.”

James Taylor, a senior fellow for environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, is a a frequent critic of Gore’s efforts. He told Cybercast News Service, “I believe that the ACP is wasting its money. People have been exposed to these over-the-top scare scenarios for so long that they take it with a grain of salt.” He dismissed the Alliance’s claim that there is only a limited time to act. “The Earth has warmed 0.6 degrees Celsius since the end of the Little Ice Age, which by the way, were the coldest temperatures during the past 10,000 years. To have warmed 0.6 degrees Celsius from such a cold spell is not very alarming.” The Little Ice Age ended around 1850. “The scientific evidence indicates that most of that warming occurred before humans could have had that much of an influence. So, at most, you’re talking about human influence being partially responsible for 0.2 degrees Celsius” increase in temperature. “To put that in perspective, if humans are influencing the climate, it’s been only at the margins, certainly not in the way that would indicate alarm,” Taylor said. Read more here.

See Paul Dreissen’s insightful comments on this latest Gore scare the world into believing tactics here.

Professors Kevin Furlong and Chuck Ammon use clips from popular weather disaster movies to supplement a course at Penn State University on natural disasters. “Every clip is another exercise in critical thinking,” explained Ammon. “Was that real? Was that fake? Is that realistic? Or is that completely unrealistic?”

Movie audiences expect Hollywood to ramp up the action by twisting fact into fiction. But what happens when Hollywood fiction is used as fact? Al Gore’s “traveling global warming show,” the award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” includes a long flyover shot of majestic Antarctic ice shelves. But this shot was first seen in the 2004 blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow.”

Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf “flyover” looks real. Karen Goulekas, the special effects supervisor for “The Day After Tomorrow” said the shot is a digital image. She was glad Al Gore used it in the documentary since “It is one hell of a shot.” Both movies use the shot to convincingly portray global warming, but it is left to the audience to decide if this created image can both entertain and educate us about our changing planet. Read more here.

See also in this Newsbusters report on the ABC story and 20/20 interview with a video on this use of computer generated special effects in both alarmist movies. 

Our failure to think clearly about such matters would be amusing if the potential consequences were not so serious. Consider the recent “lights out” campaign that supposedly should energize the world about the problems of climate change by urging citizens in 27 big cities to turn out their lights for an hour. With scores of companies and municipalities signing up, and even the monarchies of Denmark and Sweden turning off the lights in their many palaces, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) quickly called it an amazing success. Newspapers around the world dutifully wrote feel-good stories abouthow engaged environmentalists celebrated as the lights went out around the world.
Nobody, it seemed, wanted to spoil the party by pointing that the event was immensely futile, that it highlighted a horrible metaphor, or that it caused much higher overall pollution.

Are pointless gestures really the way to secure a greener future? And what sort of message does turning out the lights send? As some conservative commentators like to point out, the environmental movement has indeed become a dark force, not metaphorically, but literally. Indeed, urging us to sit in darkness will probably only make us realize how unlikely it is that we will ever be convinced to give up the advantages of fossil fuels.

Curiously, nobody suggested that the “lights out” campaign should also mean no air conditioning, telephones, Internet, movies, hot food, warm coffee, or cold drinks - not to mention the loss of security when street lights and traffic signals don’t work. Perhaps recruiting support would have been much harder had the Danes also had to turn off their heat. Ironically, the lights-out campaign also implies much greater energy inefficiency and dramatically higher levels of air pollution. When asked to extinguish electric lights, most people around the world would turn to candlelight instead. Candles are cozy and seem oh-so-natural. Yet, when measured by the light they generate, candles are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. Moreover, candles create massive amounts of highly damaging indoor particulate air
pollution, which in the United States is estimated to kill more than a 100,000 people each year. Candles can easily create indoor air pollution that is 10-100 times the level of outdoor air pollution caused by cars, industry, and electricity production. Measured against the relative decrease in air pollution from the reduced fossil fuel energy production, candles increase health-damaging air pollution 1,000-10,000-fold. Read more here.

Another week of excitement as the second solar cycle 24 spot appeared…and then disappeared just as rapidly. I can’t help feeling that with an unprecedented amount of high technology monitoring the Sun with ever higher resolution, the criteria by which a sunspot is defined has become radically weakened to such an extent that it all becomes meaningless.

On Climate Audit commenters noted that the criteria for naming hurricanes had become so weakened that practically any frontal wave in the Eastern Atlantic that persisted for more than a few hours got a name (the so-called “Tiny Tims” of the hurricane season). So it appears to be with sunspots and Solar Cycle 24.

Now in order to ascertain that there really is a spot there, I had to first make sure my laptop screen was really clean because it could have been hidden behind a rogue speck of dust and I could have missed it. Can you spot it? If so, you’re better than I. Here’s three views looking at the same spot. It may be there in the magnetogram showing the class signs of magnetic polarity reversal and there may be an associated phage (often the precursor of a sunspot) but is there a sunspot?

See full size here

Meanwhile a few days later, yet another SC23 spot comes into view. I can’t help but feel that this is all a little desperate. SC24 continues to surprise with its general unwillingness to make an unambiguous appearance. See more here.

Icecap Note: Though a paper casting more doubt on cosmic climate link was headline, the story reported also on another interesting finding that may help explain the warmth near the Antarctic Peninsula and the odd behavior of the AO and NAO the this decade.

“The EGU meeting also saw the first presentation of other research that could perhaps help to explain temperature variations seen between different regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Computer models have predicted that energetic particles hitting the top of the atmosphere in polar regions may change temperatures by stimulating the production of nitrous oxides (NOx). “The energetic particles induce NOx production, and the NOx is then transported down to the stratosphere,” explained Annika Seppala, who led the project from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and also works with the British Antarctic Survey.
“NOx destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that can then feed down to surface temperatures,” she told BBC News.

Dr Seppala’s observations appear to bear out the models’ predictions, at least in winter in the polar regions. In periods of relatively intense particle activity, some areas of the Earth’s surface in both the Arctic and Antarctic are warmer while others become colder, showing differences of up to 2C or 3C compared to the long-term averages. In periods of unusually low particle activity, the patterns are reversed. The mechanism appears to be redistributing heat across the polar regions; there is no evidence for any overall warming or cooling, Dr Seppala added, nor that the scale of the effect has changed over time.

“The results were amazing, and I think it’s something significant that we have to take into account,” commented Katje Matthes from the Free University of Berlin, who chaired the EGU session which saw the new data presented. Read more here.