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

Former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Albert A. Gore Jr. was in the news again. Braving an ice storm, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its first hearing in the new Congress to plead his case on global warming. The real purpose of his appearance should send shivers down the spine of every American taxpayer. On this visit he brought the tax man with him. That’s right! Al Gore wants Congress to impose a tax that could be considered a tax on climate. He describes his new tax as “putting a price on carbon.” And, by the way, the new name for global warming is “climate change,” acknowledging the fact that thermometers register downward trends as well as upward trends.

The warmest year in the past century was 1934, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999 and 1993. Four of the top 10 are from the 1930s, before auto emissions were a factor, while only three are from the last 10 years. As S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery point out in their latest book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years (2007), “That there has been no warming trend in the United States since the 1930s seriously undermines claims that the effects of global warming are already being felt in the United States.”

Most of those individuals known as “global warmers” have consistently relied upon the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as their reference point. The IPCC Report (1995) claims they’ve found a “human fingerprint” in the current global warming trend. Singer and Avery claim this term “human fingerprint” was inserted for “political not scientific reasons.”

The IPCC Report was challenged as lacking a scientific basis on January 28 by a former chief of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), Dr. John S. Theon. He “slammed the computer models used to determine future climate, claiming they are not scientific in part because modelers ‘resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists.’” Dr. Theon was joined by Dr. J. Scott Armstrong, founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, in stating, “The computer models underpinning the work of many scientific institutions concerned with global warming are fundamentally flawed.”

It is one thing for an issue such as global warming to be debated across the nation. It is another matter when the issue enters the tax code. As long as there are fossil fuels in use in America, the subject of carbon dioxide will be in the forefront. Although it has never been proved that CO2 has an influence on global temperature, temperature increases remain at least co-incidental with the increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere over an identical period. All this is in spite of the fact that nearly all CO2 comes from the sea. As the sea heats up CO2 is released, and as the sea cools CO2 is absorbed. This has been true since the beginning of time.

However, “Vice President Gore and other promoters of man-made climate fears and endless claims that the ‘debate is over’ appear to be ignoring scientific reality,” according to Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. A Senate Minority Report released in December 2008 details over 650 international scientists who are dissenting from man-made global warming fears promoted by the UN and Gore. Many of the dissenting scientists are former UN IPCC scientists and former believers in man-made climate change who have reversed their views in recent years. An Italian scientist and Czech scientist have just asked to join the 650 dissenting scientists.

In another part of the world, the International Geological Congress meeting held in Norway in August 2008 found that “skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting with two-thirds of the presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN’s IPCC report.” There is daily evidence that the support for the global warming concept is dwindling. A canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed that 68 percent disagree that global warming science is “settled.” An international team of scientists countered the UN IPCC report, declaring, ”Nature, not human activity, rules the climate.” Read full story here.

It wasn’t climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn’t arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.

So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of “prescribed burning”. Also known as “hazard reduction”, it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.

In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.

“Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire ... since ... about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic.” God help him, he was right.

Gentle complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at Kinglake - at the epicentre of Saturday’s disaster, where at least 147 people died - during a smaller fire there in 2007.

Read more here.

You were only twenty-six when you institute an internationally renowned as the IPCC started working. How did you go? “The IPCC was a floor above the department where I worked in the National Institute for Health and Environment (RIVM) in Bilthoven. My former boss was working at the IPCC and there was a vacancy, so he asked if I wanted to.”

Dave is at the World Bank carbon finance specialist, say specialist finance and carbon dioxide emissions trading. Her expertise is CO2 emissions and emissions trading. Dave travels with folders full of figures and tables for developing countries ministers and mayors to show how much money they can earn emissions trading.

Update 1: That was fast. The videos are no longer publicly available. There was briefly a “part 3” video, where Dave admits that she was “thrown in” to her IPCC job; her focus had been “trade policy”. To learn about climate, she read some books on a train. I’d be surprised if these two Rutu Dave videos (below) are still publicly available in six months.

Early on, she mentions that she was not the smartest student in her class, and suggests that the “lot of cute guys that were there in suits” made Model UN meetings interesting. There’s no indication whatsoever that she knows anything useful about climate science; she praises Al Gore. She’s obviously quite proud of the Nobel Peace Prize that “she” got. Rutu Dave presents herself as one of five people who wrote the first draft of the most recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers. Revealingly, more than once, she calls it the IPCC Summary OF Policymakers!

She talks about the problems trying to get the Summary approved in four days with language barriers, etc. She said the Chinese “just don’t seem to shut up” and mentions “little tricks” to move things along. She talks proudly about the IPCC getting “more famous” after Gore’s propaganda movie came out, with media attention from all over. She said she had her choice of going to Bali or to Oslo (for the Nobel ceremony), she chose Bali (mentioning the beaches). She said she’d have chosen Oslo had she known Brad Pitt would be there. Also, someone she knows actually met Uma Thurman!!

Now Rutu Dave works for the World Bank; several times, she says that they are trying to help their clients “make money from climate change”.  In the videos, Rutu who was one of 5 who wrote to Summary for Policymakers, the most widely read and used section of thr report admits she know very little about climate. Read Tom Nelson’s blogpost here.

Since the 1960s Western Society has been in the grip of a remarkable and very dangerous psychological phenomenon. Again and again we have seen the rise of some great fear, centered on a mysterious new threat to human health and well-being.

As a result, we are told, large numbers of people will suffer or die. Salmonella in eggs; listeria in cheese; BSE in beef; dioxins in poultry; the Millennium Bug; DDT; nitrate in water; vitamin B6; Satanic child abuse; asbestos; SARS; Asian bird flu—the list is seemingly endless. Indeed, we are currently in the grip of the greatest of such fear of all: that of a warming of t he world’s climate which, we are officially told, could well put an end to much of civilized world as we know it, report Christopher Booker and Richard North.

Nearly 40 years ago Stanford University population biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of imminent global catastrophe in his book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s, the world would undergo famines and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were also quite gloomy. “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Steven Milloy notes, “Forty years later, no such mass starvation has come to pass. While there have been tragic famines resulting in millions of deaths since 1968, none occurred because global food production failed to keep pace with population growth, the core of Ehrlich’s hypothesis. Per capita global food production has, instead, increased by 26.5 percent between 1968 and 2005, according to the World Resources Institute. The number of people who starve to death daily declined from 41,000 in 1977 to 24,000 today, according to The Hunger Project, an organization combating global hunger.”

Milloy adds, “Ehrlich also warned in The Population Bomb that man made emissions of carbon dioxide would cause catastrophic global warming. He suggested that a few degrees of heating could melt the polar ice caps and raise sea level by 250 feet even out-fearmongering Al ‘20-foot tidal wave’ Gore on his best worst day.”

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Senator Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine that by 1995 “…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all species of living animals will be extinct.”

In 1986, the UN reported that a disastrous 23 percent of trees in Europe were damaged by acid rain and under threat; yet by the end of the decade, the biomass stock of European forests had reportedly increased. In North America, where environmentalists had declared the forests were acidified and dying, an official $700 million, 10-year study concluded: “There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain.” Only in Scandinavia, where 16,000 of 85,000 Swedish lakes are said to have become acidified , is acid rain still a major issue in the sense of being widely discussed and publicized. Fluoridation, meanwhile, once regarded as an eco-catastrophe in the making as well as the most appalling attack on individual rights, is barely heard about any more.”

Booker and North sum it up well, “The price we have paid for such panics has been immense; most notably the colossal financial costs arising from the means society has chosen to defend itself from these threats. Yet, again and again, we have seen how it eventually emerged that the fear was largely or wholly misplaced. The threat of disaster came to be seen as having been no more than what we call a ‘scare.’ Each was based on what appeared at the time to be scientific evidence that was widely accepted. Each has inspired obsessive coverage by the media.

Each has then provoked a massive response from politicians and officials, imposing new laws that inflicted enormous economic and social damage. But eventually the scientific reasoning on which the panic was based has been found to be fundamentally flawed. Either the scare originated in some genuine threat that had been become wildly exaggerated, or the danger was found to never have existed at all. By now, however, the damage has been done. The costs have amounted in some cases to billions, even hundreds of billions of pounds, imposing enormou s hidden drain on the economy. Yet almost all of this money has been spent, it turns out, to no purpose.” The media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years -global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, at present warming. Walter Williams asks, “In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome? Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to man made global warming?”

In the midst of all the hype about global warming, have you heard about the glitch that’s been encountered? After nine years of non-warming, the planet actually began to cool in 2007 and 2008 for the first time in 30 years. The net warming from 1940 to 1998 had been a minuscule 0.2 degree C; the UK’s Hadley Center says the earth’s temperature has now dropped back down to about the levels of 100 years ago. There has thus been no net global warming within ‘living memory’, says Dennis Avery. Add to this the fact that so far, 2009 doesn’t look like another barn-burner for the warming advocates. Perhaps the next scare will be an impending ice age. Read full story with references here.

The number of people dying from effects of the cold in Wales could double this year, campaigners have warned. During an average winter, around 1,500 more people die than in other seasons. Cymru is worried many vulnerable people are frightened to turn their heating to proper levels because of high energy bills.

Meanwhile, the environment minister has said the assembly government will struggle to meet its target to end fuel poverty among the vulnerable by 2010. “I think it’s unlikely, with energy prices where they are, that we are going to meet those targets,” Jane Davidson told BBC Wales’ Week In Week Out programme. Fuel poverty is defined as those who spend more than 10% of their income heating their homes.

Campaigners told the programme many vulnerable people were frightened to turn their heating on because of high energy bills. “I think it’s terrifying, that despite all the services on board that this figure is rising - and it begs the question, are we reaching the vulnerable in Wales who need our support?” says Ros Williams, of Age Concern Cymru. They said the problem was worse in Wales because thousands of homes did not have access to mains gas and had to rely on expensive heating oil.

Official recommendations say people should keep their main room at around 21C. But the programme found Pam Price, 75, of Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, living in a room heated to 13C. Katherine Green, a single mother-of-three from Aberbargoed, Caerphilly county, had her living room at 14C.  See BBC video of Pam Price, 75, from Abertillery who turns her heating off during the day due to the cost.

Ms. Davidson said the assembly government could struggle to meet its fuel poverty targets. I am committed to doing as much as I can, and if we are unable to meet our target it won’t be through lack of trying from the assembly government.” Last year, gas bills went up by an average of 50%, with electricity costs increasing by 28%. Read more here.

See in this Hawaii Reporter story how the fear-mongers never quit, often with costly and even deadly consequences. Environmental extremists have cost the world’s economies and people dearly and killed more people with the actions they caused than all terrorist attacks in the last half century.

1. Science is in a state of decay due to corruption. Science sets the standards of rationality for society. What happens to science will happen to all of society.

2. Engineering and technology are not science. They produce a product which tests the result. The only product of science is knowledge, which is too abstract and illusive to resist corruption.

3. Here’s how junk science works. It’s analogous to Joe and Sam growing potatoes. Joe wears brown shoes, and Sam black shoes. Joe gets five kilograms per square meter, and Sam gets six. Therefore, wearing black shoes will produce a better yield than wearing brown shoes.

Example: “Scientists who examined decades of tree mortality data from research plots around the West found the death rate had risen as average temperatures in the region increased by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit.”

4. The latest fraud in Washington is outcome-directed science. It destroys discovery research, because discoveries cannot be dictated. Real progress stems from finding new ways of acquiring information, and the results are not predictable and cannot be directed.

5. Corrupters promote fraud for the sake of fraud, because they can arbitrate fraud, and it destroys the rationality needed by more competent persons. You control people through fraud, not through truth.

Science is rapidly deteriorating into a tool of propaganda for power mongers, as bureaucrats dry up funding for real science and pay only for outcome-directed research. Heavy handedness is also increasing drastically, as scientists who criticize too much lose their jobs.

The global warming fraud shows publicly what is happening throughout science. An agenda is forced onto real scientists and the public in contempt for rationality and evidence. Everyone is forced to submit to a fake consensus based on intimidation. (How the Firing Works) (See also Oreskes.)

There is little external accountability for science. As a result, little can be done to correct errors or overcome corruption. The largest errors cannot be questioned within science, and external criticism is ignored. The worst of it is that science has replaced religion in shaping social standards, and it is now aligning standards upon corruption. The high priests of science are teaching society that fraud is exploitable, and truth is a menace to be subdued. Read more here.

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists—in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling—he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg’s research less than two weeks after it’s publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news. The Stieg paper’s release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a major error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted today, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers. Here’s how the Stieg research showing supposed warming was received by the mainstream press: NPR covered it twice (a January 21 package by Richard Harris and a January 23 Ira Flatow interview of Steig), with no hard questions either time (Flatow called Steig’s paper “probably historic"). A January 22 piece in the Seattle Times by science reporter Sandi Doughton contained this little editorial:By bringing Antarctica in from the cold, the new study could undermine the small cadre of global-warming skeptics who still argue that the planet is not getting hotter, or that humans are not to blame. Many have used the apparent cooling in Antarctica to attack global climate models and point out perceived weaknesses in the scientific consensus that emissions from automobiles and factories are beginning to change global climate.

A January 22 New York Times piece by Kenneth Chang presented the report along with quotes from scientists who thought it by and large likely accurate.  One scientist was quoted saying, “But the idea of a long-term cooling is pretty clearly debunked.” No one urging caution about Stieg’s results was quoted. CNN.com’s report began:  Antarctica is warming in line with the rest of the world, according to a new study on climate change in Antarctica. Rather than being the last bastion to resist global warming, U.S. research has found that for the past 50 years much of the continent of Antarctica has been getting warmer. For years common belief among scientists studying climate change was that a large part of Antarctica, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, has been getting colder while the rest of the world has warmed. However the new research from the University of Washington has found that warming in West Antarctica exceeded one-tenth of a degree Celsius per decade for the past 50 years, which more than offsets the cooling in East Antarctica… The CNN.com piece ended with quotes from Stieg. The AP’s Seth Borenstein’s January 21 wire report began “Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all, according to a new study,” and included a quote from global warming activist scientist and study co-author Michael Mann, saying the study refuted the views of climate “contrarians.” Borenstein did, however, include two quotes from other scientists who raised questions about the study.

The Los Angeles Times’ Thomas H. Maugh II began with an editorial:  Scientists have long believed that Antarctica has been bucking the global warming trend, but that is not the case, new research shows. East Antarctica, as assorted studies have shown, has been cooling recently, but the remainder of the continent is warming at a rate that offsets the cooling, according to satellite and ground data. Global-warming skeptics have pointed to the presumed cooling of the continent as evidence that researchers’ computer projections of climate change are in error, but the new findings reported Thursday appear to refute their criticisms… Maugh’s readers weren’t told that any scientists had doubts. The San Francisco Chronicle went still further into alarmism.  Science editor David Perlman told his readers flatly that “the issue [of Antarctic warming] has apparently been resolved.” The piece was headlined: “All of Antarctica Appears to Be Warming.” The Guardian titled its piece, “Scientists Solve Enigma of Antarctic ‘Cooling,’” summarized it by claiming “Research ‘kills off’ climate skeptic argument by showing average temperature across the continent has risen over the last 50 years.” The Guardian included no alternative points of view.

Co-authors of Stieg’s paper included David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Scott Rutherford of Roger Williams University, Michael Mann of Penn State, Josefino Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Followers of the global warming issue will easily recognize Michael Mann as the proponent of the since-disgraced “hockey stick” global warming graph and an activist global warming activist and the Goddard Institute as run by one of the world’s most infamous global warming alarmists, James Hansen.  Stieg himself is a contributor to the ardently pro-alarmist and environmentalist-supported PR blog RealClimate.  Despite this, none of the mainstream press stories I reviewed mentioned the activism activities of authors. On the other side of the question, here are samples from Andrew Booker’s op-ed column in the UK Telegraph critical of Stieg:  ...So it predictably made headlines across the world last week when a new study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the Antarctic has been heating up after all. As on similar occasions in the past, all the usual supporters of the cause were called in to whoop up its historic importance.  The paper was published in Nature and heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the “deniers” and “contrarians.”

One of the first to express astonishment [about the Stieg paper] was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed “it is hard to make data where none exists.” A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for NASA, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: “with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.” Polls show the American public is continuing to apply critical thinking when it comes to the question of human-caused global warming.  Too bad the same can’t be said for much of the mainstream press.  Read more here.