HAS global warming stopped? The question alone is enough to provoke scorn from the mainstream scientific community and from the Government, which says the earth has never been hotter. But tell that to a new army of sceptics who have mushroomed on internet blog sites and elsewhere in recent months to challenge some of the most basic assumptions and claims of climate change science.

Their claims are provocative and contentious but they are also attracting attention, so much so that mainstream scientists are being forced to respond.

The bloggers and others make several key claims. They say the way of measuring the world’s temperature is frighteningly imprecise and open to manipulation. They argue that far from becoming hotter, the world’s temperatures have cooled in the past decade, contrary to the overwhelming impression conveyed by scientists and politicians.

As such, they say there should be far greater scepticism towards the apocalyptic predictions about climate change. Even widely accepted claims, such as that made by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong that “the 12 hottest years in history have all been in the last 13 years”, are being openly challenged.

“She is just plain wrong,” says Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs. “It’s not a question of debate. What about the medieval warming period? The historical record shows they were growing wine in England, for goodness sake; come on. It is not disputed by anyone that the Vikings arrived in Greenland in AD900 and it was warmer than Greenland is now. What Penny Wong is doing is being selective and saying that is a long time ago.”

But selective use of facts and data is fast becoming an art form on both sides of the climate change debate now that real money is at stake as the West ponders concrete schemes to reduce carbon emissions. So what is the validity of some of the key claims being made by these new blogger sceptics?

Their first claim is that the most basic aspect of climate change science - the measurement of global warming - is flawed, imprecise and open to manipulation. See more here.

Record high temperatures on Baffin Island last month - it hit 27C on July 21 - have made the news around the world, as has the evacuation of 21 visitors from the island’s Auyuittuq National Park. Fear that melt water from the park’s glaciers might lead to flash flooding and landslides has been reported by everyone from AFP to the BBC as proof of the adverse side-effects of man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, it is barely reported outside Alaska that America’s northernmost state is having a record cool summer. If it reaches 19C in Anchorage today, it will be just the eighth time that’s happened this summer. Indeed, this could be the first summer ever that Anchorage never hits 24C. Auyuittuq is at 66 degrees north; Anchorage is at 61. The Baffin story may be more significant than the Alaska one. But why are we hearing all about one and nothing about the other? You can bet that if Anchorage were suffering a record hot summer, it would be all over the news and presented - as the Baffin temperatures are - as yet further proof of the dangerous impacts of global warming in the north.

Nor may you have heard about conclusions by University of Guelph environmental biologist Jonathan Newman and his graduate student Anna Mika. Last week, Prof. Newman and Ms. Mika warned other researchers to use results from the UN’s 31 climate computers with great caution. No predictions of future climate-related catastrophes are reliable enough for use in making public policy “unless they are run through many models” according to Prof. Newton, and then only if most of the models are in rough agreement.

Or how about the discovery last month by NASA that at least 70% of global warming to date is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the pattern of ocean currents and cloud formation connected with the El Nino and La Nina phenomena?  Or the paper by Gilbert Compo and Prashant Sardeshmukh of the Climate Diagnostics Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that concludes, “the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases.” Where were the mainstream news stories about that?

Read more here

The environment guru has a big house, flies in big planes… and now captains a big boat. Former Vice President Al Gore, the Nobel-winning self-proclaimed global prophet of green, has made a lot of money from the so-called “crisis” of global warming. He has profited from best-selling books that tout the looming climatic catastrophe, won an Academy Award for a movie about his slideshow presentation that focuses on his “sky is falling” message about a world on the brink of environmental disaster. His business interests have been focused on the profit side of the equation when it comes to “global warming,” creating a “carbon credits” program that has put millions of dollars into the pockets of Gore and his environmental cronies. There are also financial interests benefiting from the sudden shift to the ‘environmentally friendly’ light bulbs that he has trumpeted so loudly: his friends at General Electric stand to make big money from the congressionally mandated demand for their new light bulbs.

There is no question that the alarmism and doomsday scenarios spread by Al Gore have been very, very beneficial to him personally and professionally. But the question persists as to whether he actually buys into what he is selling. His own behavior clearly indicates that he doesn’t believe we are at a “tipping point” of worldwide environmental destruction. While he preaches that the rest of us must dramatically change our lifestyles and lower our standards of living to “save the planet” he lives by another set of rules himself. It happens in the air, where he jets about in private planes that consume massive amounts of energy to spread his message of “conservation.”

His hypocrisy is revealed on land, where he travels in fleets of limos and SUVs to deliver speeches about the dire consequences of ignoring “man-made global warming” - and leaves the cars running throughout his entire speech in order to ensure that they will be nice and cool when he exits the building and returns to his gas-guzzling vehicles. His supposedly “green” mansion consumes electricity that dwarfs the consumption of the typical family home. And now, in order to complete his hypocrisy trifecta, Al Gore may now be extending his excessive consumption to the water as well. In an amazing display of conspicuous consumption, even for Al Gore, his new 100-foot houseboat that docks at the Hurricane Marina in Smithville, Tennessee is creating a critical buzz among many of his former congressional constituents. Dubbed ‘Bio-Solar One,” which may reflect some latent Air Force One envy, Gore has proudly strutted the small-town dock claiming that his monstrous houseboat is environmentally friendly. (Only Al Gore would name his boat B.S. One and not get the joke. Or perhaps the joke is on us?) The boat is a custom-built Fantasy Yacht built specifically for Gore by Bill Austin of Sparta, Tennessee. According to Austin, the engines are bio-diesel fueled and Gore can expect to use about two gallons an hour to cruise Center Hill Lake. With a 500 gallon capacity Austin says Gore won’t need a refill for “two or three years” though he admits having “no clue” about where Gore could get bio-diesel at the lake. The Hurricane Marina dock doesn’t sell it.

Read more here.

World temperature records show no evidence of anthropogenic global warming ("AGW"). Solar activity in the late 20th century was extremely high. Atmospheric CO2 levels rose as the sea surface warmed. Henry’s Solubility Law, with mass balances of carbon and its isotopes, show the total increase in atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial times is less than 4%. Burning all our remaining fossil fuels, cannot double the CO2, but only increase it by 20%. Beck cataloged 90,000 chemical measurements of CO2 in the 1800s, some as high as 470 ppm (greater than the current Mauna Loa value of 385 ppm). These data exposed as false the UN IPCC’s 280-ppm ice core values during the 1800s. IPCC’s ice core measurements of CO2 were incorrect owing to their inability to correct for problems with gas solubility and the extreme pressures in glaciers.  Not man but nature rules the climate.

The recent American Physical Society (APS) debate on anthropogenic global warming was welcomed by many like myself, who believe “global warming” to be exaggerated. I have never seen any convincing evidence for it. The paper by Hafemeister and Schwartz depended upon petitio principii, in that the emissivity value was set to produce the desired climate sensitivity. The considerable evidence presented by Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in his APS article: Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered” was convincing. The rebuttal by Dr. Smith was not. This paper addresses two key elements in the APS global warming debate: are, first, the scientific credibility of the UN, and, secondly, the truth about the minimal increase in the amount of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2.

The UN set up the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference entitled “The Earth Summit”. It was attended by Vice President Al Gore. At this Conference Sir Roy )Maurice) Strong, a UN advisor, stated, “The Earth Summit will play an important role in reforming and strengthening the UN as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance.” Al Gore is a politician, not a scientist.  He had two college natural science courses. He made a “D” in one, and a “C+” in the other. He made an “F” on his College Board physics exam and a “D” in chemistry. Gore ducks all challenges to debate (including Christopher Monckton) on AGW.

Strong and the UN set up the 1997 Kyoto conference on global warming. All countries were urged to sign a treaty to reduce their CO2 output in order to save the planet. China, India and the U.S. refused. Most of Europe joined, but have done little in the way of lowering their CO2 output. The National Review magazine, Sept. 1, 1997 quoted Strong: “The only way of saving the world may be for industrial civilization to collapse, deliberately seek poverty, and set levels of mortality”.  We’re starting to see the collapse of U.S. trucking and airline industry as our government limits oil drilling. Timothy Wirth, former president of the United Nations Foundation, stated: “We have to ride the theory of Global Warming even if it is wrong.” Richard Benedict, former advisor to Kofi Annan stated: “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no evidence of global warming.” In the words of H.L. Mencken: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

Ed Blick, Ph.D, has 54 years’ scientific experience.  Retired Air Force atmospheric scientist Dr. Edward F Black, Professor of Meteorology and Engineering at University of Oklahoma. He is the author of 150 publications in engineering, meteorology, and cardiology, and has also written two engineering textbooks. He is the co-developer of a medical patent, and is the inventor of a new type of windmill.
Read more here.

The ships’ logs of great maritime figures such as Lord Nelson and Captain Cook have cast new light on climate change by suggesting that global warming may not be an entirely man-made phenomenon. Scientists have uncovered a treasure trove of meteorological information contained in the detailed logs kept by those on board the vessels that established Britain’s great seafaring traditition including those on Nelsons’ Victory and Cook’s Endeavour.

Every Royal Naval ship kept a detailed record of climate including air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and major meteorological disturbances.  A group of academics and Met Office scientists has unearthed the records dating from the 1600s and examined more than 6,000 logs, which have provided one of the world’s best sources for long-term weather data. Their studies have raised questions about modern climate change theories. A paper by Dennis Wheeler, a geographer based at Sunderland University, recounts an increasing number of summer storms over Britain in the late 17th century. Many scientists believe that storms are caused by global warming, but these were came during the so-called Little Ice Age that affected Europe from about 1600 to 1850. The records also suggest that Europe saw a spell of rapid warming, similar to that experienced today, during the 1730s that must have been caused naturally.

“British archives contain more than 100,000 Royal Navy logbooks from around 1670 to 1850 alone,” Mr Wheeler said. “They are a stunning resource. Global warming is a reality, but our data shows climate science is complex. It is wrong to take particular events and link them to carbon dioxide emissions. “These records will give us a much clearer picture of what is really happening.”

See the paper on the use of old logbooks “British Naval Logbooks from the Late Seventeenth Century: New climatic information from old sources” by Dennis Wheeler of Sunderland University here. See the UK Telegraph story here.

Read another take on the new findings By Jonathan Leake in the timesonline here here. He notes: “Britain’s great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

We’re heading into the heart of hurricane season, and any day now, a storm will barrel toward the United States, inspiring all the TV weather reporters to find a beach where they can lash themselves to a palm tree. We can be certain of two things: First, we’ll be told that the wind is blowing very hard and the surf is up. Second, some expert will tell us that this storm might be a harbinger of global warming. Somewhere along the line, global warming became the explanation for everything. Right-thinking people are not supposed to discuss any meteorological or geophysical event—a hurricane, a wildfire, a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a blizzard, a tornado, a lightning strike, an unfamiliar breeze, a strange tingling on the neck—without immediately invoking the climate crisis. It causes earthquakes, plagues and backyard gardening disappointments. Weird fungus on your tomato plants? Classic sign of global warming.

Some people are impatient with even a token amount of equivocation. A science writer for Newsweek recently flat-out declared that this year’s floods in the Midwest were the result of climate change, and in the process, she derided the wishy-washy climatologists who couldn’t quite bring themselves to reach that conclusion (they “trip over themselves to absolve global warming").

Humans surely contributed to the calamity: Farmland in the Midwest has been plumbed with drainage pipes; streams have been straightened; most of the state’s wetlands have been engineered out of existence; land set aside for conservation is being put back into corn production to meet the demands of the ethanol boom. This is a landscape that’s practically begging to have 500-year floods every decade. Was climate change a factor in the floods? Maybe. A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that heavier downpours are more likely in a warming world. Thomas Karl, a NOAA scientist, says that there has been a measurable increase in water vapor over parts of the United States and more precipitation in the Midwest.

But tree-ring data indicate that the state has gone through a cycle of increasing and decreasing rainfall for hundreds of years. The downpours this year weren’t that unusual, according to Harry J. Hillaker Jr., the Iowa state meteorologist. “The intensity has not really been excessive on a short-term scale,” he said. “We’re not seeing three-inch-an-hour rainfall amounts.” This will be a wet year (as was last year), but Iowa may not set a rainfall record. The wettest year on record was 1993. The second wettest: 1881. The third wettest: 1902.

Iowa is an awkward place to talk about global warming, because the state has actually been a bit cooler in the summer than it was in the first half of the 20th century. Hillaker says the widespread shift to annual plants (corn and soybeans) and away from perennial grasses has altered the climate. The 10 hottest summers in Iowa have been, in order, 1936, 1934, 1901, 1988, 1983, 1931, 1921, 1955, 1933 and 1913. Talk about extreme weather: One day in 1936, Iowa set a state record with a high temperature of 117 degrees. And no one blamed it on global warming. Read more here.

Al Gore blew into Washington on Thursday, warning that “our very way of life” is imperiled if the U.S. doesn’t end “the carbon age” within 10 years. No one seriously believes such a goal is even remotely plausible. But if you want to know what he and his acolytes think this means in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency has just published the instruction manual. Get ready for the lawnmower inspector near you.

In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA’s nanomanagement. Thankfully none of it has the force of law—yet. However, the Bush Administration has done a public service by opening this window on new-wave green thinking like Mr. Gore’s, and previewing what Democrats have in mind for next year.

The mess began in 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Mass. v. EPA that greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” under current environmental laws, despite the fact that the laws were written decades before the climate-change panic. The EPA was ordered to regulate if it decides that carbon emissions are a danger to the public. The 588-page “advance notice of proposed rulemaking” lays out how the EPA would like it to work in practice.

Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his dissent that under the Court’s “pollutant” standard “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies,” which the EPA appears to have taken literally. It is alarmed by “enteric fermentation in domestic livestock”—that is, er, their “emissions.” A farm with over 25 cows would exceed the EPA’s proposed carbon limits. So would 500 acres of crops, due to harvesting and processing machinery.

But never fear. The EPA would regulate “farm tractors” too, plus “lawn and garden equipment.” For example, it “could require a different unit of measure [for carbon emissions] tied to the machine’s mission or output—such as grams per kilogram of cuttings from a ‘standard’ lawn for lawnmowers.”

Meanwhile, the EPA’s career staff is unsupervised. In December, they went ahead and made their so-called “endangerment finding” on carbon, deputizing themselves as the rulers of the global-warming bureaucracy. The adults in the White House were aghast when they saw the draft. EPA lifers retaliated by leaking the disputes of the standard interagency review process to Democrats like Henry Waxman and sympathetic reporters.  Read more about what could be the greatest threat to our economy and way of life here.

T. Boone Pickens is being lionized for his efforts to legislate a transformation to “eco-friendly” wind energy. We’re “the Saudi Arabia of wind,” he argues. We need to “overcome our addiction to foreign oil,” by harnessing wind to replace natural gas in electricity generation, and using that gas to power more cars and buses. If Congress would simply “mandate the formation” of wind corridors, provide eminent domain authority to seize rights-of-way for transmission lines, and renew the subsidies for this energy, America can make the switch in a decade, he says.

Pickens’ $58-million media pitch makes good ad copy, especially in league with Senator Harry Reid’s absurd claim that oil and coal “make us sick.” However, his policy prescriptions would bring new energy, economic, legal and environmental problems - and a price tag of over $1.2 trillion. Hydrocarbon fuels built modern America, gave us the technologies and living standards we enjoy today, helped us eradicate diseases that plagued earlier generations, and boosted US life expectancy from 50 in 1900 to nearly 80 today. They still provide 85% of our total energy, and we could greatly reduce our reliance on oil imports if we would simply end the outrageous policies that keep our nation’s abundant energy resources locked up. We have enough oil, natural gas, oil shale, coal and uranium to provide power for centuries. We have a growing consensus that we need to drill, onshore and off. But partisan intransigence and ridiculous environmental claims prevent us from utilizing these American resources.

Wind contributes more every year to our energy mix. But it still provides only 1% of our electricity - compared to 49% for coal, 22% for natural gas, 19% for nuclear and 7% for hydroelectric. Moreover, we will need 135 gigawatts of new electricity generation by 2020, whereas only 57 GW are planned. We can and should harness the wind. But 22% by 2020 is far-fetched.

Wind power is expensive (even with subsidies), intermittent and unreliable. Many turbines are 400 feet tall and carry 130-foot, 7-ton, bird-slicing blades. They operate at only 20-30% of rated capacity - compared to 85% for coal, gas and nuclear plants - and provide little power during summer daytime hours, when air-conditioning demand is highest, but winds are at low ebb. Using wind to replace all gas-fired power plants would require over 300,000 1.5-MW turbines, covering Midwestern “wind belt” agricultural and wildlife acreage equivalent to South Carolina. Building and installing these turbines requires 5 to 10 times more steel and concrete than is needed to build far more reliable nuclear plants to generate the same amount of electricity, says Berkeley engineer Per Peterson. Add in steel and cement needed to build transmission lines from distant wind farms to urban consumers, and the costs multiply.

Since adequate wind is available only 3-8 hours a day, we would also need expensive gas-fired generating plants that mostly run at idle, kicking in whenever the wind dies down. That means still more money, cement and steel - and still higher electricity prices. Read more here.