We are well into 2010, and depending on how you count, the decade of the 2000’s, the “oughts” is over. This is a time when climate scientists have been looking back over the decade in order to compare it to previous decades. We hear from some of these scientists that this decade was the warmest ever, even warmer than the 1990s. This fact was proclaimed happily at the Copenhagen conference in December, and then it is often repeated by the media and scientists who attended the meeting.

Also, the year 2009 is cited as being one of the top 10 warmest years ever. Additionally, other studies cite the increase in the ratio of record warm days to cold days during the decade points to a human contribution. Thus, the relative warmth of the “oughts” is cited in and of itself as proof of the human impact on climate.

Aside from the fact that these statements are making these observations only within the context of the instrumental record since 1850, these proclamations are attempting to establish the correlation (warmth to increases in human numbers and activities) as a cause. This is something that we caution against in undergraduate statistics classes.

Often, these climatologists claim that it is highly unlikely from a statistical standpoint that the warmest years in a time series should be clustered at one end of the record or time series . A study showed this to be the case whether you impose long or short term variations on the record and generate a random series from these data. This is true, but only if you assume that there is no general trend over the entire length of the time series.

It is relatively easy to demonstrate that one can construct a “time series” in which the “warmest” years are clustered at the end of the series without invoking a human cause. This “time series” will even look similar to the instrumental record. Keep in mind that this demonstration is purely linear (does not include non-linearity, which would be a part of any observed or natural time series).

A study by Suhler and O’Brien postulated that most natural variations in climate occur on a time-scale of close to 2 to the nth power. While external climate forcing and non-linearity may make this assumption difficult to show conclusively, the formula itself provides us with the easy way to demonstrate that a simple “time series” can be constructed such that the “warmest” years occur late in the time series (figure 1 top). Here we take n = 3, 6, and 8, representing cycles of 8, 64, and 256 years, respectively, and simply add them. It is even possible to demonstrate that the latest “decade” is warmer than the previous one. Note the similarity to the observed record. The technique is similar to that used by Klyshtorin and Lybushkin (2007).

Additionally, such a record should produce a higher ratio of warm “days” and record warm “days” as compared to cold “days” if you examine the distribution of temperatures in the latest 30 years in figure 1 as compared to the previous 30 years. Again, this is regardless of the causation of the variations in figure 1.

Finally, it is worth reminding the reader that the temperature changes which occurred during the 20th century were not inconsistent with inferred changes during the last two millennia. An examination of the 20th century temperature records showed approximately a 1 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise overall, but with two distinct periods of temperature increases broken by a period of temperature decreases between 1940 and the late 1970s.

Figure 2. Global temperature anomaly reconstructions for the last 2000 years . Figure provided courtesy of Dr. Roy Spencer.

During both of these 20th century periods of global temperature increase, the total rise for each was about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit or an average increase of about 0.2 degrees rise decade. Temperatures then reached a peak in the 1998-2000 time frame and have since leveled off, or even begun to fall. This could be due to natural variations such as a quieter sun, and changes occurring in the Pacific Ocean temperatures. This temperature trend is projected to continue for about 5 - 20 years by reputable scientists, even some supporters of anthropogenic global warming.

So while it is fashionable to review the best and the worst of the decade that just ended (or will end, again depending on your count), the relative warmth of the “oughts” is not proof that humans are altering the climate.

See full post with the references here.

In Trek to Northern Pole of Inaccessibility called off because of thin ice by Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service, February 12, 2010 we read:

“Citing the “perilous” frailty of the polar ice cap, a British team’s bid to trek from the edge of Arctic Canada to the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility - the most remote place in the Arctic Ocean - has been scuttled just days ahead of the planned departure from Nunavut’s Ellef Ringnes Island. Warned by Environment Canada that the High Arctic is experiencing the “worst conditions” for winter ice cover in decades, the leader of the proposed 1,100-kilometre journey said making the attempt would be “foolhardy” and “endanger lives unnecessarily.”

It’s the third time adventurer Jim McNeill has been thwarted in his quest to complete what’s been called exploration’s “last true world first” - a slog to the spot in the Arctic Ocean that lies the greatest distance from any point of land. In 2003, a bout of flesh-eating disease in his ankle ended the trip. In 2006, the attempt was aborted due to disintegrating ice and equipment problems. And the latest cancellation follows last week’s release of a landmark Canadian study that highlighted unprecedented expanses of open water in the polar sea and predicted ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean much sooner than previously forecast.” The story was carried in numerous papers includingt the Star Phoenix.

In actual fact the summer ice has recovered 26% from its 2007 minimum (below and enlarged here).

Professor Brian Pratt of the University of Saskatchewan posts in the Star Phoenix a rebuttal.

SP parroting nonsense
By Brian Pratt, The StarPhoenix, February 12, 2010
Re: Arctic sea ice vanishing faster than expected (SP, Feb. 6).

Brian Pratt
Saskatoon

Anthony Watts adds the punctuation mark with this image with likely path below, enlarged here.

Hat tip to Susan for the story.

Our old friend Jo Abbess BSc is back. And she’s got some searching, pertinent questions which could put paid to my AGW-denying antics once and for all!

Dear James,

Inquisitively yours,

Now the only reasons I’m rising to Jo’s bait are a) because I know it will give you all so much pleasure and b) because of what it says about the delusions of the Warmist lobby. They really do seem to imagine, bless, that the only reason anyone could possibly have for being sceptical about AGW is if they were being bribed by sinister business concerns (Big Oil, etc) or had some similar vested interests.

The Independent On Sunday had another feeble attempt at resurrecting this myth at the weekend. But the sad truth (sad, that is, for those of us who really wouldn’t mind being funded by Exxon and wouldn’t feel compromised one bit) is that all the big money has long since migrated to the other side. For Warmists, there are fortunes to be made in lavish grant funding, carbon trading, government subsidised green non-jobs, and so on. For us sceptics there’s little more than the satisfaction of having right and truth on our side.

As Richard North points out, the amount Exxon spent over 10 years funding sceptics is as nothing to the quantities of public money which has been splurged on funding climate change alarmism:

Over ten years, the company paid a grand total of $23 million to sceptics (by no means the larger part of which was devoted to climate change) less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

Against that, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government had poured in $32 billion for climate research. In 1989, the first specific US climate-related agency was created with an annual budget of $134 million. Today in various forms the funding has leapt to over $7 billion per annum, around 50 fold higher.

That, of course, is only the US picture - and government funding. To that, one must add the hundreds of millions, if not billions, poured in by the charitable foundations, and the massive funding from industry - much of which ends up in the pockets of advocacy groups such as the WWF.

Then, albeit on a smaller scale, we have other nations around the world adding to the funds. In the UK we have seen that the Met Office has been given 243 million pounds of taxpayers’ money on “climate research”, and that represents just the tip of the iceberg.

Today, the good Dr North has yet another shocking story about taxpayers’ money being squandered on global warming drivel. Turns out that man in charge of discredited Working Group II section (yep: the one which responsible for Glaciergate, Amazongate and Africagate) of the risibly flawed Fourth IPCC assessment report was paid over one third of a million quid for supervising this piece of tosh. His name is Professor Martin Parry.

Dr North reports:

Through his own personal consultancy, Martin Parry Associates, he was paid 330,187 pounds by Defra, for the part-time post of: “Acting as Co-chair of Working group II at meetings of IPCC WG II and associated groups.”

Additionally, his consultancy was paid 10,690 pounds, again by Defra to “assess the global impact of climate change on world food supply and global food security” - the very issue in which Parry is supposedly expert.

That was, presumably, separate from the contract in the financial year 2002/2003 for a study on “Global Impacts of Climate Change on Food Security”. For that, Parry Associates were paid 64,020 pounds. That was the year, incidentally, that the Global Atmosphere Division of Defra supported 35 research contracts on climate change, in 21 different establishments, at a total of 12 million pounds.

These sums, however, are only a small part of the total which went into preparing the WGII report. Defra also paid 1,436,162 to “provide the scientific and administrative Technical Support Unit (TSU) for Working Group II (WGII) on Impacts and Adaptation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to provide support for the chair of WGII, Professor Martin Parry and the preparation of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report,” paid via the UK Met Office.

An entirely separate sum of 1,144,738 was awarded to Working Group II Technical Support Unit under the amorphous title “An international commitment to provide technical support on climate change,” also paid to the Met Office.

This means that the scientists and experts who “volunteered their time” on WGII were paid to the tune of nearly 3 million (2,921,777) by British taxpayers alone - which does not of course include the sums paid by other nations and the production costs, or the payments by the IPCC directly.

Let me run that one by you again, just in case the full horror didn’t sink in properly. YOU paid 3,000,000 pounds of your hard-earned dosh in order to fund a farrago of nonsense concocted in order to justify still more of your money being spent in the future to deal with a crisis which only exists in the imaginations of corrupt scientists, EU apparatchiks, One-World-governmenters, carbon-traders, third world kleptocrats and hysterical eco-loons.

Just for your amusement, here’s Professor Parry two years ago, boasting on the BBC website about the, er, robust integrity of the IPCC review process.

Several thousand scientists are asked to review the authors’ drafts, at two different stages; and there are also two stages of review by governments. The purpose of the review is to ensure that the assessments are a fair reflection of the views of the whole scientific community, not just of the authors themselves. Each chapter has two review editors to ensure that reviews are considered and responded to appropriately. The assessments are therefore stuffed with references regarding one tendency suggested by some sets of data, and other tendencies suggested by others.

It is a summary of what we know and - just as importantly - what we do not know.

Earlier he claims:

This is why they err, if anything, on the side of conservatism and have been criticised for not exploring the outer edges of knowledge. And if you want to make yourself even more depressed have a guess where he is now.

We discuss here in some detail the way in which warming trends were introduced into the IPCC Report - when in fact they did not exist or were extremely small. We focus on the period 1979 to 1997. There was cooling up to 1976; in 1998 there was a super-El-Nino and no subsequent warming. Our discussion is in three parts: (1) a ‘bottoms-up’ approach; (2) the ‘top-down’ approach; and next week I shall discuss (3) the treatment of sea surface temperatures (SST).

Bottoms-Up Distortion of Temperature Data

The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU-UEA), under the direction of Dr. Philip Jones, collected data from weather stations from around the world. These are almost all land-based stations, showing a high concentration in the United States and Western Europe and a lower concentration elsewhere -with many parts of the globe hardly covered by reliable stations.

There are a variety of problems with such data, and the investigators were aware of most of them. Many stations produce useless data, either because of inadequate maintenance, or because of their location. Anthony Watts (in his WUWT blog) has shown that even stations in the USA were badly placed and subject to local warming influences that were not adequately corrected.

The surface of the earth is then divided into grid boxes, usually five degrees by five degrees. When there are several stations in a grid box, the investigators would choose those they considered most reliable - which in many cases meant urban stations, or stations at airports, that are well maintained. However, because of their location, they generally are subject to ‘urban heat-island’ (UHI) effects, a local warming that increases with population and urban growth over time and suggests a temperature trend of a global nature. The investigators tried various ways to eliminate such local UHI trends, but were not very successful.

The problem was greatly exacerbated by the closing of over half the world’s weather stations between 1970 and 2000 (see NIPCC Summary, Fig 12 - which in most cases removed rural stations but also stations from higher latitudes and altitudes that tended to show a lower warming trend or no warming trend at all. It should be obvious therefore that this drastic change in the sampling population would introduce a fictitious warming trend which is an artifact of the change. E. Michael Smith and Joseph D’Aleo have documented in some detail how such artificial temperature trends could be produced even when there was no global trend.

The Top-Down (TD) Approach

In many ways, the ‘Top-Down’ (TD) approach to derive the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is to be preferred over ‘bottom-up’ (deriving GMST by collecting data from weather stations and sea surface readings). The TD approach relies primarily on the data from weather satellites, the only truly global measuring system, using a single microwave sounding (MSU) instrument and therefore independent of the vagaries of individual weather stations and their thermometers.

There are of course certain disadvantages: The MSU cannot measure temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere but derives instead a ‘weighted mean’ of the vertical temperature profile; the times of observation are fixed by the orbit of the satellite; a change of satellite, and MSU instrument, requires an overlap in operating time to permit a recalibration. Nevertheless, by comparing different view angles, one can change the weight factors and obtain a temperature value for ‘Lower Troposphere.’ The University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) group has shown good agreement of UAH results with those of radiosondes from weather balloons.

As early as 1997, I noticed a disparity between temperature trends of satellites and surface trends, esp. in the tropics. (See Fig 9 in Hot Talk, Cold Science, 1997) The troposphere trends (between 1979 and 1995) were close to zero or even slightly negative, while surface trends showed a warming of about 0.05 deg per decade. This disparity is just the reverse of what one would expect from GH models [see IPCC-SAR] - namely a positive (warming) troposphere trend up to twice as large as the surface trend.

In addition, I noticed that the proxy data to which I had access showed no surface warming (tree-ring data of Jacoby et al (Fig 16 in HTCS) and ice core data of Dahl-Jensen et al]. I tried very hard to obtain more proxy data but was not successful. For example, I noticed that Michael Mann’s infamous hockeystick graph did not extend beyond 1979 and suspected that his proxy temperatures diverged from the instrumented surface results. Yet when I wrote to Mann about post-1980 proxy data, I received only a brusque negative reply. Thanks to ‘Climategate’ we now know, what I had then suspected, i.e., that Mann and Jones were engaged in a scheme to “hide the decline [in post-1979 proxy temperatures].”

To sum up: Both the satellite results and the proxy data tell us that the claimed rise of surface temperature between 1979 and 1997, shown by IPCC, is probably much smaller or even non-existent.

S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former founding Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. He is author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate (The Independent Institute, 1999).

Richard Somerville, Ph.D. is a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He has told San Diego “City Beat” that KUSI promised to present his full statement on-air but didn’t. He was talking about my January 14th hour long program “Global Warming: The Other Side”. KUSI contacted Scripps seeking a response to the program for our 10 PM newscast that night. Scripps referred our Producer to Somerville. The Producer who had that assignment assures me that no “promise” was made. But according to the nasty City Beat editorial that slam-bams the program, Somerville said the station didn’t run his written statement and included only a couple of “garbled” sentences from a lengthy interview during a 10 p.m. newscast. He called KUSI and me “unethical.”

I object to his remarks to “City Beat” and take particular exception to being called unethical.

First, I was aware the station was seeking a response from Scripps but unaware that it had been obtained until shortly before the program aired. The production of the program had already been completed and it was never intended that a response would be included in the program. Rather it was intended to be seen in the newscast immediately following the program. I scrambled to get some of the Somerville video on the newscast. I was told to use less than a minute of the Somerville interview and to read the entire statement from NASA. No one even mentioned a written statement from Somerville. I was attempting to accomplish good journalism. I don’t know that I totally accomplished that, but I am sure that KUSI and I were not unethical.

I am now going to go through the video of the Somerville interview done by one of our cameramen using questions written by one of our producers to see if I can put together a segment for our second global warming special scheduled for later this month. I think that will help give more balance.

But please understand, equal time is not required or justified here. The media, including the KUSI newscasts, carry frequent reports supportive of the global warming claims and agenda. The media frequently carries programs about the dire global warming predictions. “An Inconvenient Truth,” shown over and over again in the schools, is totally one-sided. Our one and only program debunking global warming falls far short of balancing the overall budget of global warming coverage on television or even KUSI.

Here are the first three of Dr. Somerville’s six points about the skeptical side of the global warming debate from the Scripps website. After each of his points, I offer a response (in blue).See the Somerville statement and John’s detailed reply here.

See the first TV special in 5 segments here. The show was immensely successful beating out 30 Rock in that hour and receiving over a million letters and comments, nearly all favorable. NOAA, NASA and Scripps took exception (Scripps sent 22 scientists to Copenhagen including Somerville). Somerville, who was on the losing side of the New York City debate along with Gavin Schmidt versus Richard Lindzen, Michael Chrichton and Richard Courtney. The skeptics turned the audience around. Somerville likes to point to the IPCC’s rigorous process for peer review research and scientific review. I wonder if he has heard the IPCC’s credibility is falling faster than snowflakes in DC.

The other unbelievable part of this story is the arrogance and ignorance of Somerville in attacking John and KUSI as unethical for not reading his letter on air or inserting his whole interview in their news show. Friends, having been interviewed a hundred times, you are always lucky to get more than one 10 second soundbite in a television inteview. Long monologues by arrogant academics don’t make for ratings even if he was right (which is not the case). John is doing his best to be responsive and letting you read and see both sides and in his blog showing Somerville’s the errors of his ways. I look foward to the second show. Hopefully there will be more and more stations and networks will copy KUSI.

The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report - that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today.

Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate. But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.
Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth - whose department has responsibility for the Met Office. Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails - acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data. Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office.

He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming. The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.
Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.

Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings. The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.

But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’.

It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests. In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth - then MoD Minister of State - used exactly the same language. Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report.

When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer. The email, dated July 17, 2008 - when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU - provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote: ‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’

At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague:

‘[We are] still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions - not to respond.’ Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said:

‘It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years.

‘The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.’ Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.

Read story here. Read more here and here. 

Bryan Walsh has a great career in public relations awaiting him. Unfortunately he is currently passing himself off as a journalist for Time Magazine.

PR, a profession I have enjoyed for several decades, is widely seen to “spin” facts to a client’s advantage and this is frequently the case. PR is advocacy. Journalism is supposed to be something else, i.e., the unbiased, objective reporting of the facts. Someone needs to explain this to Bryan.

In an article titled “Explaining a Global Climate Panel’s Key Missteps”, Bryan barely pretends to be a journalist as he engages in whitewashing some widely known facts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ scam for the propagation of the huge global warming hoax.

Bryan correctly notes that the IPCC was “one of the most respected organizations in the world” and, in October 2007, had shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, a famed global warming blowhard and fabulist best known for predicting the end of the world next Tuesday.

Bryan noted that the Norwegian Nobel committee had “lauded the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” Note that these are stated as facts, but in truth there never was a “consensus” in the worldwide community of climatologists and meteorologists, and other scientists.

Indeed, there have been three international conferences to debunk global warming, all sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank that brought together some of the world’s leading scientists who participated in seminars and gave addresses that were illustrated by graphs and other data that debunked global warming. A fourth conference is scheduled in May and, who knows, some members of the U.S. media might actually attend and report the truth this time?

The assertion that there is a connection between human activities and the non-existent global warming doesn’t even meet the lowest standard of journalistic accuracy. There is no connection. None has ever been proven despite the claims. In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.

Bryan finally got around to mentioning that “over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits.” Hello! Those hits have been around for years, but the leak of emails in November 2009 between the key players in the global warming fraud unleashed a tsunami of revelations about the way the IPCC relied on deliberately distorted “facts” and strove to suppress the publication of the truth in leading science publications. It wasn’t over the past week or two unless Bryan has been in a deep comma for three months.

Calls for the resignation of IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, were noted. He has been under fire because he knew in advance of the Copenhagen conference that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were bogus. Plaintively, Bryan asked,
“What’s wrong with the IPCC?” and then answered saying, “To some degree, it’s a victim of its own size.”

Wrong again. The IPCC may have claimed that it had some 2,500 scientists participating, but the real “work” of the IPCC was undertaken by a close knit group of global warming fraudsters, several of whom are under investigation. They include Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that provided key data regarding the planet’s temperatures---which always seemed to be rising exponentially.

Others included Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a paleoclimatologist famed for his “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that managed to overlook the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Joining the merry pranksters was Prof. Keith Briffa, another CRU researcher, who dished up a tree ring theory that confirmed global warming.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, linked increased hurricane activity to global warming, but was probably hard pressed to explain those years when it did not increase. There are others like Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute that got the whole ball rolling in 1986 when he told Congress that global warming would destroy the Earth if we didn’t put an end to all energy use that generated greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of noting the misdeeds of these and others closely affiliated with the IPCC, Bryan quoted a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a “lead author on the 2007 IPCC report.” And we know how eager Richard Somerville must have been to suggest it might have been a thousand pages of nonsense. Bryan also quoted Peter Frumhoff of the left-learning Union of Concerned Scientists who repeated the tired IPCC message that “there is no debate about the core urgency” of global warming.

No debate? The debate has been raging for decades. Bryan, however, just plowed on, offering one excuse after another to cover the IPCC’s serious breach of ethics and accuracy, concluding that its “self-assessment” after each report and
“the pressure to be flawless” is the problem, but not the lies it has been putting forth since 1988.

“But that’s exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward,” said Bryan.

No, policymakers need is real science, proven science. And the IPCC “science” about global warming, now rebranded as “climate change”, is an insult to all real scientists and, beyond them, to a worldwide public that was consistently led to believe a massive hoax.

Time, Newsweek, and countless others in the mainstream media have been co-conspirators in the global warming fraud. It is time to end this shameful blot on journalism and begin to report facts, not apocalyptic fantasy. Read Alan’s blog here.

Solar Cycle 24 was a late starter, about three and a half years later than the average of the strong cycles in the late 20th century and almost three year later than the weak cycles of the late 19th century.  It was almost as late as Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum.  The last few months have seen it ramp up relatively rapidly.

[Note: Solar Cycle 22 and 23 are overlaid on solar cycle 3 and 4 above to show similarity]

Plotting up the last three solar cycles relative to the Dalton Minimum, another solar minimum is not precluded by the data to date (below, enlarged here).

With Solar Cycle 23 ending up at twelve and a half years long, applying Friis-Christenson and Lassen theory to the temperature record of Hanover, New Hampshire (below, enlarged here) results in a two degree centigrade decline in the annual average temperature at this location over the expected twelve years of Solar Cycle 24, from December 2009 to late 2021.  Given some record low monthly averages in the northeast US in the recent summer, and the current cold winter, this cooling is well under way.

Read story and comments here.

Also shown in this analysis by the Armaugh Observatory in Ireland (below and enlarged here).

ICECAP NOTE: SNOWCOVER RUNNING WELL ABOVE NORMAL

The Weather Channel and Heidi Cullen of Climate Central, who used to haunt the halls at The Weathrer Channel while talking about the frigid cold and snow in most places in mid-latitudes from Europe and Russia to China and the United States, in their infinite ignorance mentioned that global warming did not go away because it was warmer than normal in the arctic regions. Of course, any practicing meteorologist knows this kind of 5 standard deviation nagative arctic oscillation (high latitude blocking) that we have had is what drive cold to mid-latitudes and that comes with warmer higher latitude temperatures (still cold but above normal). TWC is owned by GE which had expected to benefit hugely from global warming and carbon trading, solar and wind power and NBC is the green peacock network and Heidi Cullen now works for George Soros funded Climate Central. GE stock which once was over $40/share is hovering around $15. And as for Climate Central, George you are wasting your money.