This story is by Fred Gielow, the author of You Don’t Say, a collection of stories that did not get reported on the evening news that shiould and who manages a web site by the same name. He researched and catalogued the headlines over the past century showing the alternating multi-decadal hype about warming and cooling.  See the listing here.

US annual mean temperatures from 1895 to 2005 - NCDC USHCN Version 1

Hysterics greet the Australian broadcast of “The Great Global Warming Swindle” as the land down under endures its coldest June since 1950. According to the greenies, global warming caused that, too. It hasn’t gotten as much media hoopla as Al Gore’s full-length cartoon on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the documentary by British filmmaker Martin Durkin has not escaped the notice of the high priests in Archbishop Gore’s Church of Climate Change.

Viewable on Google video (video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566) and soon to be available on DVD, Durkin’s film has branded him a major heretic. Last week it was broadcast for the first time by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But rather than let it stand on its merits, ABC followed it with a rather one-sided bash session led by ABC host Tony Jones. Durkin called it an “ABC studio assault” that revealed the “intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp.”

Afterwards, writing in The Australian, Durkin understood the warm-mongers frustration: “To the utter dismay of the global-warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. “According to their own figures (from the U.N.-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirm this.”

Some serious cooling occurred last month in Australia. Aussies endured their coldest June on average since the Cold War was in its infancy in 1950. Queensland in the northeast was particularly frosty. Townsville’s June was its coldest since 1940. June 24 saw the coldest Brisbane morning — ever.  But for greenies, it doesn’t matter what the weather actually is or what the data actually show. It’s all caused by global warming. As Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault explained in 2005: “Global warming can mean colder; it can mean drier; it can mean wetter; that’s what we’re dealing with.” Oh.  Such hot air is exactly what we’re dealing with.

See full story here.

You may be interested to hear this radio interview (Ottawa radio CFRA) on the story about human fingerprint on precipitation patterns, based on the Nature paper by several high-profile modelers in Canada and the UK that was covered in local canadian newspapers.  Dr Khandehar is an Environmental Consultant whose expertise is on extreme weather events. Madhav first job as a meteorologist was in India but spent 25 years with Environment Canada in Unionville , Ontario before retiring. 

Travelers are running into an uncomfortable reality: Going green means sacrificing some luxuries. The tough choices ahead as resorts try to cater to eco-conscious consumers.  One increasingly common approach to addressing the environmental impact of travel is the purchase of carbon offsets—credits that help fund the reduction of emissions elsewhere on the planet. For an estimate of the cost of offsetting common vacation activities, Read the full story here. Offsetters Climate Neutral Society, a nonprofit that sells carbon offsets and consults with the travel industry on energy efficiency, estimated how much CO2 these activities generated in 24 hours..

Bruce Schwoegle, a Massachusetts Meteorologist and CTO for Mysky Communications, Inc., challenged the estimates for some of the activities here and pointed out we often forget the energy needed to produce the alternative energy sources. He wrote the following to Jeffrey Ball at the WSJ.

I am a scientist, not a jet skier and WSJ print subscriber.  I am also puzzled re your comprehensive report on CO2 emissions.  It bothers me (I rarely write missives such as this) that I cannot comprehend the figures you promulgate.  Am I missing something?  For instance, 730 pounds for 3 hours on a jet ski?  Gasoline is 6 pounds per gallon with carbon only being part of that weight, and I assume 5 gallons for the 3 hours = 30 pounds.  Granted, combustion is uniting carbon in the gas with oxygen (.08lbs/cubic ft.) to produce CO2……but 730 total pounds?  I’m not familiar with how much pure oxygen a small engine burns, but this seems waaaaay out of the ballpark.

And I note that the electric (non solar) golf cart emits far less CO2, but what about the emissions related to generating electricity to charge it?  Indeed, what about CO2 utilized to produce and deliver solar cells for the cart?  If no logical explanations exist, such correlations are beyond belief.  I’m a skeptic re the media’s induced major global warming frenzy and suggest that such figures likely reflect an Al Gore mentality.

During today’s hearing, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, confronted Stephen Johnson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with a threatening e-mail from a group of which EPA is currently a member. The e-mail threatens to “destroy” the career of a climate skeptic. Michael T. Eckhart, president of the environmental group the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), wrote in an email on July 13, 2007 to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):

“It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.”

In a July 16, Washington Times article, Eckhart confirmed that he did indeed write the email.

After Senator Inhofe read Eckhart’s comments, Johnson vowed to launch a probe concerning the threatening e-mail. Johnson responded to Inhofe saying, “I was not aware of this quote.” He continued, “Statements like this are of concern to me.  I am a believer in cooperation and collaboration across all sectors.” Johnson then added, “This is an area I will look into for the record.” (See YouTube video of exchange between Senator Inhofe and Johnson)

See full blog on this issue with other examples of attacks on skeptics in recent months (including RFK Jr. lashing out at skeptics of global warming: ‘This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors’ (July 8, 2007) “ here.

The local weatherman can’t forecast more than about 10 days out, and neither can the experts tell us how warm, or cool, the planet is going to be in 2100, 2075 or even 2050.  Even short-term predictions have been off. James Hansen, NASA scientist, predicted a 0.45-degree Celsius (0.81-degree Fahrenheit) rise in global temperature from 1988 to 1997. But in reality (a place environmental activists rarely visit) the increase was a mere 0.11-degree Celsius.  We hope no one in Hansen’s neighborhood relies on him to tell them when it’s going to rain or when they’ll need a coat and hat.

We also question the concept of a “global” temperature. How could such a thing be measured when weather stations dot rather than blanket the Earth? Danish physicist Bjarne Andresen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, made sense earlier this year when he said it’s “impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth. “A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system (and) climate is not governed by a single temperature,” he said. “Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. , which make up the climate.”

The formula for a climate of fear, though, requires nothing more than a lot of thunder and a bit of heat generated by political activists.

Read full story here.

Have Northeast winters grown dramatically warmer in the last 30 years? A researcher for the Union of Concerned Scientists says yes, emphatically. UNH researcher Dr. Cameron Wake’s findings of a four-degree increase from 1970 to 2000 have been cited in a congressional global warming hearing and contributed to UCS reports last year and this month that predicted huge changes ahead.

But a retired Boston meteorologist says the finding is the product of biased data selection. It is something the scientists group has been accused of before. “I can get anything I want out of the data, too, depending on what years I start and finish. That’s not rocket science,” said Dr. Fred Ward, longtime Channel 7 weatherman, now retired and living in New Hampshire,
Wake said last week his figures are accurate, the product of intense research of temperatures recorded by 75 government-sanctioned observation stations throughout the region. He said it was Ward’s research, using data from only 11 National Weather Service stations in New England, that was “shoddy.’’ Ward’s figures show winter temperatures have risen only two-tenths of a degree since the early 1970s. He compared the average temperature reported by the stations from 1971 to 1975 to the average temperature reported by the stations from 2001 to 2005.

See more of the debate here.

Icecap Comment: Cameron Wake’s analysis is meaningless. The data reflects in part the urban heat island effect of the growth of many small towns (Oke showed even a town of 1000 could have a heat island effect of 2C in winter). Fred’s analysis for the major cities is more meaningful. His 11 major first order stations already were urban in 1970. In any event, there is no doubt there has been some warming since the 1970s reflecting the 60-70 year cycles so obvious to anyone who really looks at the data objectively.  This temperature cycle is due to natural cycles in the sun and oceans as we have shown here and others in many peer review papers, ignored by Wake, and advocacy groups like the so-called Union of Concerned Scientists.

In yet another case of bad journalism we are getting used to, CBS News proclaimed the UK floods this summer were the results of global warming.  “CBS Evening News” Monday night correspondent Elizabeth Palmer, doing a report on the greatest floods in England since 1947, stated:  “And Britain is going to have to get used to it. Research published today suggests human activity is warming the planet and changing rainfall patterns.”

The Daily Mail in the UK presented a more balanced picture. “ It was devastating. In only two hours, three times the average monthly rainfall drilled into swaths of southern England, moving north and wreaking havoc.” Follwing on the heels of the wettest June in 60 or more years in places, “...on Friday, the South West, Midlands and Yorkshire were hit by the second such downpour this month. It had been predicted but, to those caught up in them, the torrents that ran through the streets and flooded the countryside were no less catastrophic for that. To many, the black skies and fierce rains must have seemed an ominous portent of things to come: symptomatic of the environmental ravages of global warming. “

Weatherman John Kettley however sees it differently. “In my view, none of the severe weather we have experienced is proof of ‘climate change.’ It is just a poor summer - nothing more, nothing less - something that was the norm throughout most of the Sixties and has been repeated on several occasions more recently. Going further back, history also shows that 1912 was an atrocious summer. It was so bad, in fact, that we are still some way short of the torrential downpours that happened that year. It seemed particularly bad at the time because 1911 had been such an exceptionally good summer. So, taking a long view, there is a pattern of warming and cooling. The Edwardians were experiencing a period of significant warming (much like now) following a cold Victorian spell.