Update:  Record snow falls in Europe and North America mean ski resorts open early.

Michael Plummer was looking forward to the ski season after sitting out all of last year because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament. But he didn’t think it would come this early.

Tuesday’s snowstorm kicked off a five-day accumulation that has reached about 46 inches of snow, allowing Snowbird Ski Resort to open Friday, the second-earliest start in the resort’s 38-year history. The resort didn’t open until Nov. 28 last year.

“It feels fantastic to be out this early. I forgot how it felt to be out here,” said Plummer, who was at the resort with his son and some friends. “It’s pretty good skiing. There’s some rocks showing through, but I’m not picky. I’m hoping this means a long and epic season.”

Snowbird is the only resort open so far, giving skiers and snowboarders a head start on the season. Most resorts typically open after Thanksgiving. The Aerial Tram, as well as the Gadzoom and Mid-Gad lifts, were open on Friday and open terrain included Regulator Johnson from the top of Hidden Peak, as well as Big Emma and Bassackwards.

Even though the runs and lifts are limited, Ben Hauber has been out every day since Friday and hasn’t gotten bored yet. It is the Pittsburgh native’s first ski season since moving to Utah. “According to my friends, it’s a bad day, but this [would be considered] a great day back home,” Hauber said. “The first day was awesome. All I plan on doing is working and being here [at Snowbird].”

Snowbird does not release figures but Public Relations Director Jared Ishkanian said the resort has seen a steady flow of skiers and snowboarders. The tram, which accommodates 125 people per trip, has been consistently about 80 percent full on each of the three days since the resort opened for the season. Ishkanian is hoping the early start is a good omen for the rest of the season. “By getting an early start, it helps us with word of mouth and gives us good publicity,” Ishkanian said. “If people have snow in their backyards in the valley, it shifts their mind-set from fall to winter. They think of snow and they think of skiing. The economy is a factor this year, but in our experience, if we get snow early and often, it goes a long way in assuring a positive experience.’’ Read more here.

Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply. As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]”.

Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.

So it’s disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri’s presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university. Later that night, on ABC TV’s Lateline program, Pachauri claimed that those who disagree with his own views on global warming are “flat-earthers” who deny “the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence”. But what evidence could be more important than the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged only a few hours earlier? In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming sceptics is shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate when questioned about it on Lateline. Read more here.

Right on comment on the Herald Story here: When IPCC head has to lie about global temperatures, you know there’s something seriously wrong. Personally, I find it incredible that anybody still believes a word the IPCC says. We always knew that it was a politically-motivated body whose sole aim was to find evidence to back up a conclusion already reached. Instead of acting like proper scientific investigators and saying, “well, the fact is that global temperatures are pretty steady or even declining, so let’s use this opportunity to find out why so that we can better understand the mechanics of the climate,” they lie and mislead in order to keep their preconceived ideas afloat.The IPCC has abandoned all pretence of impartiality and has become just another in the long line of alarmist organisations desperate to keep the AGW bandwagon rolling in order to achieve political objectives. As Michael Duffy says, shocking.

Alarmist Gavin Schmidt from RealClimate lit into Duffy in a 400 word response even though the editing rules limit word count to 200. Many other letters were submitted to try and support Duffy and dispute Gavin’s rants, most appear to have been rejected. Here are a few. Here are a few that made it through today. Try your hand.

Thanks to Dr. Benny Peiser for these two stories:

CLIMATE RISK: GREEN LABOUR PARTY LOSES ELECTION IN NEW ZEALAND
By Rohan Sullivan, AP

New Zealanders chose a wealthy, conservative former financier Saturday to help navigate the country through the global financial meltdown, handing long-serving left-wing Prime Minister Helen Clark a crushing election defeat. John Key, the 47-year-old leader of the conservative National Party, swept easily to power in this South Pacific country of 4.1 million people, ousting Clark’s Labour Party after nine years in office.

Key has promised a more right-leaning government than Clark’s, which for almost a decade made global warming a key policy issue. In a country where the environment is a mainstream political issue, Key has vowed to wind back Clark’s greenhouse gas emission trading scheme to protect businesses from financial losses, and to reduce red tape he says entangle important dam projects.

BEYOND BRITAIN: BLOW FOR BROWN’S GREEN AGENDA AS BP QUITS KEY PROJECTS

By Robin Pagnamenta, energy and environment editor, The Times

Government plans for Britain to become a world leader in clean energy technology suffered a double setback yesterday after BP said that it was abandoning the country’s wind energy industry and pulling out of a competition to build a demonstration carbon-capture and storage plant.

The oil company informed the Government last week that it would no longer be submitting a bid for a government-funded scheme to develop a coal-fired power plant using carbon capture and storage (CCS), an experimental technology that strips out CO2 emissions for safe storage. The CCS competition was announced in November last year and is a key feature of the Government’s plans to fight climate change while creating one million green-collar jobs in renewable energy.

A spokesman for BP, which announced record third-quarter profits of 6.4 billion pounds last week, said that the group had withdrawn because it had struggled to find suitable partners. “We came to the conclusion that we could no longer put together a winning consortium,” the spokesman said. He added that BP was dropping plans to invest in UK windfarm projects in favour of better returns in the industry in the United States. (Note: at the current rate which wind farms are being built, the UK will generate only about 5 to 7 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020, Scottish & Southern Energy Plc’s (SSE) chief executive Ian Marchant said earlier this year)

In memory of Michael Crichton, who died Tuesday, let us consider a question that preocuppied him: How do we separate science from religion in environmentalism? As a spinner of sci-fi horror stories himself, he had a finely honed skepticism for the apocalyptic scenarios presented by environmentalists. In a speech in 2003, he argued that environmentalism was a modern remapping of Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths:

“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.”

Whatever solace these beliefs might offer the faithful, he argued, they were unrealistic for most people - especially for people in poor countries suffering from the ravages of nature - and didn’t do much good for the environment, either:

“Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about
balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: “we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I’m afraid that answer doesn’t sound so simple to me. It’s fine to demand more stringent requirements for research and reporting on environmental issues, but how do you enforce that? While Mr. Crichton rightly criticized some scientists and environmental groups for hyping the evidence of global warming, he himself underplayed some of the evidence.

Mr. Crichton did offer one specific idea for revamping research. Pointing to the Food and Drug Administration’s policies of financing independent tests of the same, he suggested replacing the Environmental Protection Agency with a less politicized agency - “an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.” Could that work? Do you have any better ideas? See more here.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

FP: What is the science behind global warming theory?

Durkin: Lousy. If you examine the mountain of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) literature on this, you’ll find the vast majority of it concerns the possible (projected) effects of climate change. Most of this is highly suspect and does not address the central question of whether humans are causing the climate to change. The climate has always changed. Climate change is nothing new. The question of whether we are having anything to do about it, of course, rests on the CO2 question.

FP: Ok tell us about CO2.

Durkin: CO2 is a very small gas in the atmosphere. It is vital of course - without it we wouldn’t be here. But it’s small. It’s not at all the most important greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gases themselves, and the ‘greenhouse effect’, form only one small part of the earth’s climate system (and not a very well understood part either). There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature on any significant timescale, except where you find, in ice core data, CO2 levels being influenced by temperature levels (there’s a time lag between the two phenomena). Even global warmers admit that, for CO2 to make any difference, there would need to be some mechanism to amplify its effect in the atmosphere. No such amplifier has been shown to exist. They haven’t even been able to demonstrate how one might work in theory (the trouble is the only conceivable amplifier would be water vapour, and water vapour makes clouds, which are rather famous for their cooling effect - at least the low level ones).

So what are we left with? Temperature has risen, slightly, falteringly and gradually for about 150 years or so (even ‘warmer’ scientists can’t claim that this started because of us). The period before this rise has long been known as a ‘Little Ice Age’, from which we are evidently making a welcome recovery. We only started pumping out CO2 properly in the postwar boom, but what did temperatures do? In the postwar period they fell, till about the mid-70s. Then they went up again (just like they did at the beginning of the 20th Century, and then for the past ten years they’ve more or less flat-lined, decreasing slightly. Where is the evidence that humans are changing the climate? This is nothing but prejudice. It is not serious science.

FP: If the science is so faulty, why does the culture at large rely on it so much? What political underpinnings are involved in this scare? Who profits?

Durkin: There are people who profit, and that is part of the story, but I think not the most important part. I have followed green politics for a while now. I was asked to make a documentary series for Channel 4 in the UK more than a decade ago (they got very cross with me) so I’ve been sucked into it in a way. It is transparently obvious that the greens sit squarely in the tradition of Romanticism. Like the romantics, they hate industry, love nature, idealise peasant life, they think capitalism is wicked, they think people in modern society lead depraved shallow lives and have forgotten the true value of things, they don’t like cars or supermarkets or lots of proles taking cheap long-haul holidays, etc, etc.

Read more here.

Thomas Friedman discusses his new book, ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded,’ which describes how a green revolution is needed to save the planet from overheating, at the Book Passage in Corte Madera. (IJ photo/Jeff Vendsel)While sharing a taxi cab with Al Gore, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asked the former vice president - who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for drawing the world’s attention to the problem of global warming - for a written apology.

Friedman said Americans can fight the problem of global climate change - but told his Marin listeners that small-scale strategies, like buying fluorescent light bulbs or hybrid cars, are unlikely to make a difference. Instead, he asserts the U.S. government must encourage the development of renewable resources like wind and solar energy by making them less expensive than fossil fuels. “Whichever country creates this energy technology will have the most energy security, national security, economic security and global respect,” Friedman said. “If it’s not the United States, the likelihood that our kids will enjoy the same standard of living that we do is zero.”

“I wanted him to write a column in which he apologized for underestimating climate change,” Friedman told a crowd of about 250 people Thursday at Corte Madera’s Book Passage, his only Bay Area appearance. Friedman was only partially joking. Although he’s written extensively about terrorism, globalization and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Friedman believes climate change may be the greatest threat the United States - and the world - has ever faced.

“Climate change is bringing about ‘global weirding,’” said Friedman, the author of “Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution And How It Can Renew America.” “Hot weather will get hotter, wet weather will get wetter, droughts will last longer and violent hurricanes will become more frequent.” The world’s weather patterns are changing, Friedman said, because more nations are developing lifestyles similar to those of Americans - particularly in their reliance on petroleum. That newfound addiction is propping up the governments of “petrodictatorships” like Iran, Russia and Venezuela, Friedman said, and is responsible for the extinction of about one of the world’s species every 20 minutes.

Thomas L. Friedman, an author and journalist, joined The New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in OPEC- and oil-related news and later served as the chief diplomatic, chief White House, and international economics correspondents.

Icecap Notes: More proof that little (a very litle bit) of knowledge is dangerous.

Human activity and, in particular, the production of greenhouse gases can be linked definitively to warming in parts of the Arctic and Antarctic, according to a new study that makes the controversial connection for the first time. Scientists used models to determine the causes of climate change in the two polar regions, finding that only when they included human influences could they explain the rise in temperatures in both areas. Nathan Gillett, who co-wrote the study appearing Thursday in the online journal Nature Geoscience, said they compared four different models using man-made versus naturally occurring factors on temperatures. Their stark discovery was that only with the influence of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, could they simulate the warming trend in parts of the remote regions."It makes clear that the warming that we’re seeing definitely can be linked to human influence in the Arctic and the Antarctic,” said Nathan Gillett of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at Environment Canada in Victoria. “We could only explain the warming when we included greenhouse gases and human climate influences.”

Scientists link human activity to warming in polar regions for first time. Human activity and, in particular, the production of greenhouse gases can be linked definitively to warming in parts of the Arctic and Antarctic, according to a new study that makes the controversial connection for the first time. Scientists used models to determine the causes of climate change in the two polar regions, finding that only when they included human influences could they explain the rise in temperatures in both areas."That’s why this study is so important because it formally demonstrates the human contribution for the first time,” said Andrew Monaghan of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

But some in the scientific community disagree, adding to an already splintered array of opinion on the causes of climate change and whether the Antarctic is actually warming. John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama, has done studies on climate models and says they are extremely limited tools in trying to mimic what happens in nature. He said they are unable to reproduce all of the naturally occurring influences and, as a result, give a false picture of what might be causing changes in the environment. Clouds, for example, can dampen warming in the real world, but he said models have been shown to amplify warming. “They overstate the confidence of what they have in that result because we have too many examples of models that fail,” Christy said from Huntsville. “We have shown that climate models just don’t have the variability that nature provides to us.” Christy too disputed whether the bulk of continental Antarctica is warming, saying that it is, in fact, cooling. The report looks largely at the Antarctic peninsula - which makes up two per cent of the continent - and the eastern and western coastal regions, where they have found warming. The report focuses on temperature changes going back to 1900 and up to the present, but doesn’t include earlier periods when areas in the Arctic were actually warmer than they are today and were not affected by man-made greenhouse gases, said Christy. “Just 1,000 years ago the Arctic was much warmer than it is today so it’s interesting that they would use the term conclusively,” he said. “Natural variability can account for warming since the Arctic has been warmer before.”

The Arctic icecap is now shrinking at record rates in the winter as well as summer, adding to evidence of disastrous melting near the North Pole, according to research by British scientists.

They have found that the widely reported summer shrinkage, which this year resulted in the opening of the Northwest Passage, is continuing in the winter months with the thickness of sea ice decreasing by a record 19% last winter. Usually the Arctic icecap recedes in summer and then grows back in winter. These findings suggest the period in which the ice renews itself has become much shorter. Dr Katharine Giles, who led the study and is based at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), said the thickness of Arctic sea ice had shown a slow downward trend during the previous five winters but then accelerated. She said: “After the summer 2007 record melting, the thickness of the winter ice also nose-dived. What is concerning is that sea ice is not just receding but it is also thinning.” The cause of the thinning is, however, potentially even more alarming. Giles found that the winter air temperatures in 2007 were cold enough that they could not have been the cause. This suggests some other, longer-term change, such as a rise in water temperature or a change in ocean circulation that has brought warmer water under the ice. Read more here.

ICECAP Note: This only goes to prove what we and researchers at JAMSTEC (Koji Shimada) and University of Alaska (Polyakov) have said that the periodic arctic warming and melting periods as we found in the 1930s and 1940s and again this last two decades relate to passage into the arctic of warmer water from the Atlantic and Pacific during their warm multidecadal ocean periods. The ice thinning comes from water beneath the ice being warmer than normal so the ice melts from the bottom even as frigid air above the ice adds to the surface ice in winter. With the cooling of the Pacific and now the Atlantic, this ice rebound process which began this past summer when the ice extent was 9% greater than last summer should continue in the years ahead. The increase in ice this month may end up being a record for October.

See larger image here