You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the chasm that divides today’s so-called expert classes from the mass of humanity than the snow crisis of Christmas 2010. They warn us endlessly about the warming of our planet; we struggle through knee-deep snow to visit loved ones. They host million-dollar conferences on how we’ll cope with our Mediterranean future; we sleep for days in airport lounges waiting for runways to be de-iced. They pester the authorities for more funding for global-warming research; we keep an eye on our elderly neighbours who don’t have enough cash to heat their homes.

This isn’t to say that the entire climate-change thesis is wrong. I’m not one of those people who believes snowfall necessarily disproves every claim made by warming-obsessed climatologists. Rather the snow crisis demonstrated, in high definition, the gap between the fear-fuelled thinking of the elite and the struggles of everyday people. It illuminated the million metaphorical miles that now separate the fantasy politics of our so-called betters from the concerns of the rest of us.

Not surprisingly, with snowstorms smothering Western Europe and the East Coast of America, many asked: ‘What happened to global warming?’ On the 20-hour bus-and-boat-and-train-and-car journey I took from London to Galway, surrounded by people forced to make a similar trek because their flights were also cancelled, there was much jocular banter along the lines of: ‘So this is the climate change we’ve been warned about...’ As people made new friends and arranged impromptu carpools for the final legs of their journeys, there was a palpable sense that the world we inhabit is not the same as that inhabited by greens.

That isn’t surprising when you consider that greens have been telling us for the past decade that snow will disappear from our lives. Literally. ‘Snow is starting to disappear from our lives’, reported the Independent in March 2000. It quoted an expert from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (of recent Climategate fame) who said ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’. In 2006, the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists said winters had become ‘warmer and less snowy’ thanks to global warming.

Other climate-change campaigners told us to prepare for Saharan weather. A book published as part of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ jamboree in 2007 - The Global Warming Survival Handbook - said there would soon be ‘searing temperatures, killer storms, drought, plague and pestilence’. Award-winning green theorists told us to prepare for life on a ‘hotter planet’ in which ‘the traditional British winter [is] probably gone for good’. Newspapers provided us with a ‘hellish vision of life on a hotter planet’ where deserts would ‘reach into the heart of Europe’ and global warming would ‘reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles’.

Dramatic stuff. And unadulterated nonsense. The thing that occupied people’s minds at the end of 2010 was not how to explain to their sweating children in the deserts of Hampshire why snow disappeared from our lives, but rather how to negotiate actual snow. Again, this isn’t to say that the snow proves there is no planetary warming at all: if it is mad to cite every change in the weather as proof that Earth is doomed, then it’s probably also unwise to dance around in the slushy white stuff in the belief that it proves that all environmental scientists are demented liars. But the world of difference between expert predictions (hot hell) and our real experiences (freezing nightmare) is a powerful symbol of the distance that now exists between the apocalypse-fantasising elites and the public.

What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies - and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis.

Indeed, The Global Warming Survival Handbook gave the game away when it encouraged people to see the future through ‘carefully crafted “what if?” stories’. Admitting that it is virtually impossible to predict our climatic future - ‘We can’t even forecast if it will rain next week’ - it advised us to host ‘scenario parties’ to ‘pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends’. It’s the closest we’ve had to an admission by the green movement that its warnings of future desert-spread are based on its own feverish teenage imaginings rather than on scientific forecasts. The snow crisis demonstrated this in Technicolor (well, in bright white): that the expert elites have taken leave of the realm of reality, preferring to seek meaning and momentum in the fantasy notion that they are fighting a hot apocalypse.

Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. Apparently it’s those who ask ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’, rather than those who predicted ‘no more traditional British winters’, who need to have their heads checked. Because what they don’t understand - ignoramuses that they are - is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialised society is to blame, just as surely as the absence of snow was proof of the same thing 10 years ago.

‘The snow outside is what global warming looks like’, said one headline, in a newspaper which 10 years ago said that the lack of snow outside is what global warming looks like. A commentator said that anyone who says ‘what happened to global warming?’ is an ‘idiot’ because nobody ever claimed that global warming would ‘make Britain hotter in the long run’. (Er, yes they did.) Apparently the reason people don’t understand the (new) global-warming-causes-snow thesis is because they are ‘simple, earthy creatures, governed by the senses’: ‘What we see and taste and feel overrides analysis. The cold has reason in a deathly grip.’

This reveals the stinging snobbery at the heart of the politics of global warming. Because what we have here is an updated version of the elitist idea that the better classes have access to a profound and complicated truth that the rest of us cannot grasp. Where we have merely sensory reactions (experience), they have reason and analysis (knowledge). Our critical reaction to the snow actually revealed our failure to understand The Truth, as unveiled by The Science, rather than revealing their wrongheadedness in predicting an ‘end to snow’. We are ‘simple’, they are ‘reasoned’. In 2011, we should take everything that is said by this new doom-mongering expert caste with a large pinch of salt - and then spread that salt on the snow which they claimed had disappeared from our lives. See this excellent piece here.

I recently read an interesting discussion on ‘uncertainty in climate modeling’ by Tebaldi, Schmidt, Murphy, and Smith in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, But the authors ignore some of the central problems that plague climate models that try to predict the development of future climate. I am referring here to three major issues:

1) Uncertainties of the scenarios that determine the emission of greenhouse gases, principally economic growth, which is closely tied to the use of energy. Economic growth in turn, is a function of population and economic development and may be roughly approximated by GDP growth. The IPCC lists a wide spectrum of what they consider to be plausible scenarios and calculates global temperatures for the year 2100 with an uncertainty spread of an order of magnitude [IPCC 2007, Fig. SPM.5, p.14].

2) Structural uncertainties. I include here uncertainties in climate forcing, both anthropogenic and natural; in climate feedbacks; and in the hundred or so parameters that go into constructing a model, mainly concerned with clouds. While the IPCC uses fairly precise numbers for the various greenhouse gases, it omits the most important one, namely water vapor. Its contribution is encompassed within the models in terms of a positive feedback that amplifies the forcing of anthropogenic greenhouse gases by a factor of about 3.

The uncertainties listed for aerosols are quite large, particularly for the indirect effects of aerosols in providing condensation centers for cloud formation. [IPCC-AR4 2007, Fig. TS-5, p.32]. In addition, aerosols come in different flavors, ranging from reflecting sulfates to absorbing soot particles. Unlike well-mixed GH gases, like CO2, aerosols show particular geographic and temporal distributions, which also affect climate projections significantly. Given the realistic range of aerosol compositions used here, it is not possible for global models to correctly calculate the cloud albedo effect if composition is ignored [Roesler and Penner 2010].

James Hansen, a leading climate modeler, called attention to our inadequate knowledge of radiative forcing from aerosols when he stated, “the forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change” [Hansen 1998].

Parameterization is a vexing issue for climate modelers. James Murphy [Nature 2004] lists some 100 or more parameters that must be chosen, using the modelers."best judgment.” Varying just six of these parameters related to clouds can change the climate sensitivity from 1.5 up to 11.5 degC [Stainforth et al 2005].

Even more important, the feedbacks (from WV and from clouds) may actually be negative rather than positive (as assumed in all climate models). This possibility follows from the analyses of satellite data [by Lindzen and Choi 2010 and by Spencer and Braswell 2010].

3) Chaotic Uncertainty. It is well understood that climate is a chaotic object and climate models reflect that property. The outcome of a particular model run ("simulation") depends sensitively on the initial conditions; even minute changes can lead to greatly differing outcomes. For example, the five runs of a Japanese MRI model show temperature trends that differ by almost a factor of 10, an order of magnitude. (If more runs had been performed, the spread would have been even greater.) One can show [Singer and Monckton 2011] that taking the mean of an ensemble of more than 10 runs leads to an asymptotic value for the trend. However, most modelers face constraints on time and money and are not able to carry out so many runs. For example, of the 22 models in the IPCC compilation of “20 CEN” [an IPCC term for a group of climate models] there are 5 single run models, 5 two-run models, and only 7 models with four or more runs.

Conclusion:
Clearly, models cannot be used to predict future global temperatures reliably. (Note that variability and uncertainty of models is even greater for regional temperatures and for quantities other than temperature, such as precipitation.) The chief value of models, I believe, derives from their use to test sensitivity of outcome to variations in specific forcings or input parameters.

References:

Hansen, J.E., et al. 1998. Climate forcings in the industrial era. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 95: 12753-12758.

IPCC-AR4 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.

Murphy, J.M., et al. 2004. Quantification of modeling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations. Nature 429: 768-772.

Roesler, E.L. and J.E. Penner. 2010. Can global models ignore the chemical composition of aerosols? GRL 37: doi:10.1029/2010GL044282

Singer, S.F. and C.W. Monckton. 2011. Chaotic behavior of climate models. (Submitted)

Stainforth, D.A., et al. 2005. Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Nature 433: 403-406.

See the full newsletter here.

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“...I dont think you need more money to arrive at the wrong answer faster.”

In Autonomous Minds, Joe Bastardi and Piers Corbyn commented on the UKMO claim that with bigger and faster computers they may have forecast the brutal cold December. Bishop Hill comments:

Autonomous Mind has interviewed Joe Bastardi and Piers Corbyn about the use of supercomputers in long-range weather forecasting. I liked Joe’s last word on the subject:

“It’s not the computer, it’s the limits of the computer in trying to adjust to what only men can understand and use. I don’t think you need more money to arrive at the wrong answer faster. Should put it into fighting hunger, or giving men a chance to be free enough to dream and pursue that dream...much better causes in my opinion.”

We have seen an astonishing 40 years of scaremongering triggered by a few irresponsible scientists whose computer models became so vividly real for them that they abandoned basic adult responsibilities in their consequent public agitations.  After a brief dalliance with the possibility of the onset of the next glaciation, their efforts turned to warming, encouraged no doubt by the remarkable annual increases of CO2 recorded at Mona Loa.  They devised models to give CO2 a more important role in climate than observations and properly conducted historical reconstructions support.  The models do this by means of an hypothesised positive feedback involving water vapour, a feedback which is implausible from our knowledge of atmospheric history, and unconfirmed by recent observations, not least of air temperatures which fail to show the tropospheric ‘hotspot’ predicted by the models.  The ‘settled science’ of CO2 applies merely to its radiative properties, since the impact of these on the climate system is far from settled, with expert estimates ranging from an overall slight cooling, to a slight warming from projected increases in ambient CO2 over the next hundred years or so.  The apocalyptic stuff requires those computer models and their novel feedbacks. 

Models which are mere toys in the face of the immense complexity of the system they refer to.  Models fit only to illustrate some aspects of speculations about the climate amongst relevant professionals, and not nearly good enough to warrant the widespread alarm they have been used to support.

It seems to me that adults, and in particular professionals, have a moral responsibility to avoid such scaremongering, and in particular to protect school-age children from it.  The temptations to pursue it for financial and political gain, or even for the pursuit of publicity and public attention as ends in themselves, are obvious and in part explain the enthusiastic adoption of climate scares by powerful individuals and organisations keen to grow in power and influence.  That they have dramatically succeeded in this is one of the most interesting features of the current scare, and one which is surely worthy of deep study in many disciplines if we are to have any hope of reducing our vulnerability to such exploitation.

While the media/political class chattering in and around climate will no continue into the indefinite future, perhaps continuing the 20th century tradition of alternating, on an approximately 30 year cycle, between cold and hot dooms. (Certainly the recent cold weather over most of the northern temperature latitudes has seen more talk of ice ages, ‘little’ or otherwise.) Or, the talk may become more nuanced, and less vulnerable to refutation, by deploying less specific threats such as ‘climate change’ or ‘climate disruption’, giving the agitators scope for pushing their ‘cause’ on the back of the inevitable excursions of weather events near or beyond previously recorded extremes.  Attempts have been made to make this particular spin, but their impact seems limited, presumably because of the huge prior success in promoting the warming motif.

The establishment (media, political classes, academia, governments, the EU, the UN, major NGOs and other multinational corporations) has bought wholeheartedly into climate alarm, some no doubt for genuine and honest reasons, based on trust in the pontifications of erstwhile respected bodies such as the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London, or indeed of the once ‘dull and dowdy’ Met Office, now transformed with the help of a WWF activist into an important exponent of ‘climatism’.  They make for a wealthy and powerful force driving and/or riding the tide of alarmist opinion about climate.  It might seem futile to resist it.

But what else can we do?  Will it self-destruct?  The case for alarm over human impacts on climate is so thin, so tenuous, that it seems doomed to collapse from its own absurdity.  The last year or so, from Climategate onwards, has seen much to encourage this view, aided and abetted by the wacky sense of humour of the weather gods who produced the Gore Effect so many times, and, now, another winter on the cold side over very extensive areas in the northern hemisphere.

Unfortunately the alarmist-virus is out and into the educational bloodstream, threatening to produce more and more demoralised and frightened children.  At the very least, we who look on appalled at its spread, can try to find and encourage antibodies wherever and whenever they appear.  To mix-in the earlier metaphor, the tide may be turned earlier in some places than in others.  Variability is, after all, all around us. Read more here.

Important new paper Warming Power of CO2 and H2O: Correlations with Temperature Changes, Paulo Cesar Soares, International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, 1, 102-112 doi:10.4236/ijg.2010.13014 Published Online November 2010 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ijg)

Abstract:

The dramatic and threatening environmental changes announced for the next decades are the result of models whose main drive factor of climatic changes is the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Although taken as a premise, the hypothesis does not have verifiable consistence.

The comparison of temperature changes and CO2 changes in the atmosphere is made for a large diversity of conditions, with the same data used to model climate changes. Correlation of historical series of data is the main approach. CO2 changes are closely related to temperature. Warmer seasons or triennial phases are followed by an atmosphere that is rich in CO2, reflecting the gas solving or exsolving from water, and not photosynthesis activity.

Interannual correlations between the variables are good. A weak dominance of temperature changes precedence, relative to CO2 changes, indicate that the main effect is the CO2 increase in the atmosphere due to temperature rising. Decreasing temperature is not followed by CO2 decrease, which indicates a different route for the CO2 cap-ture by the oceans, not by gas re-absorption. Monthly changes have no correspondence as would be expected if the warming was an important absorption-radiation effect of the CO2 increase.

The anthropogenic wasting of fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere shows no relation with the temperature changes even in an annual basis. The absence of immediate relation between CO2 and temperature is evidence that rising its mix ratio in the atmosphere will not imply more absorption and time residence of energy over the Earth surface. This is explained because band absorption is nearly all done with historic CO2 values. Unlike CO2, water vapor in the atmosphere is rising in tune with temperature changes, even in a monthly scale. The rising energy absorption of vapor is reducing the outcoming long wave radiation window and amplifying warming regionally and in a different way around the globe.

Conclusions:

The main conclusion one arrives at the analysis is that CO2 has not a causal relation with global warming and it is not powerful enough to cause the historical changes in temperature that were observed. The main argument is the absence of immediate correlation between CO2 changes preceding temperature either for global or local changes. The greenhouse effect of the CO2 is very small compared to the water vapor because the absorbing effect is already realized with its historical values. So, the reduction of the outcoming long wave radiation window is not a consequence of current enrichment or even of a possible double ratio of CO2. The absence of correlation between temperature changes and the immense and variable volume of CO2 waste by fuel burning is ex- plained by the weak power of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to reduce the outcoming window of long wave radiation. This effect is well performed by atmosphere humidity due to known increase insolation and vapor content in atmosphere.

The role of vapor is reinforced when it is observed that the regions with a great difference between potential and actual specific humidity are the ones with high temperature increase, like continental areas in mid to high latitudes. The main implication is that temperature increase predictions based on CO2 driving models are not reliable.

If the warmer power of solar irradiation is the independent driver for decadal and multidecadal cycles, the expected changes in insolation and no increase in greenhouse power may imply the recurrence of multidecadal cool phase, recalling the years of the third quarter of past century, before a new warming wave. The last decade stable temperature seems to be the turning point.

See much more detail here. See also here.

!!! UPDATE: Read the Europol Press Release here !!!

- Estimated 5 billion euros in damage for European taxpayers
- Massive fraud involving criminal networks / Middle East

Here’s more proof that trading of CO2 emission certificates is fraught with fraud and attracts seedy criminal organizations - all costing the consumers and taxpayers billions.

Worse yet, it has spread out of control and appears that the authorities can’t keep up.

The Austrian online Kleine Zeitung here reports that Europol have raided an elaborate CO2 emissions scam in Italy and have arrested more than 100 persons.

The Kleine Zeitung writes: “The damage runs in the billions of euros”.

According to Europol, the Italian tax authorities, directed by the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, have raided 150 companies in Italy. The fraud involves evasion of value added tax with CO2 emission certificates. More than 100 have been arrested and are suspected of being involved in organised crime.

The Kleiner Zeitung reports that the Italian Electric Utilities trading markets had earlier halted entire trading with emissions certificates “because a high number of abnormal transactions”. The loss in tax revenue just from VAT (MTIC (Missing Trader IntraCommunity Fraud) alone is estimated to be 500 million euros, the online Kleine Zeitung writes.

The fraud is widespread

According to reports, it’s been known since June of last year that criminal organizations have been using CO2-emissions trading for defrauding governments of value added tax.

This is not the first time that police raids of this scale have taken place. It’s the latest in a series of raids that have been carried out all over Europe this year, all involving the trading of CO2 emission certificates. It seems the authorities just can’t keep up with the multitudes of swindlers out there.

Norway, Switzerland and the EU countries Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, the Netherlands, Slovak Republic and Portugal are all among the countries trying to identify the network of criminals behind this massive fraud - a fraud with links to criminal networks operating outside the EU and in other continents, like the Middle East.

2500 investigators - trying to identify. That means they haven’t yet. That’s a lot of fraud. The fraud has spread from science to finance. Expect a meltdown - sooner than later.

UPDATE 2: Recall this Danish fraud.

See post and comments here.

"Bundle Up. It’s Global Warming” - December 26, 2010, New York Times opinion article by Judah Cohen.

It’s Orwellian when cold is declared warmth. It’s deceitful and insulting when it occurs in the midst of a huge blizzard shutting down much of the northeast.

I would not even trust the date on the front page of The New York Times because the newspaper long ago lost touch with reality, with sanity, and, one can only assume, readers fleeing to other sources for the news.

When the oft-called “newspaper of record” chooses a day on which Mother Nature is demonstrating what tons of snow and chill air can do to a huge swath of the nation’s northeast with effects reaching Tallahassee, they are either trying to see just how stupid their readers are or doubling down on the global warming hoax they have disseminated since Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute declared we’re all doomed back in 1988.

If you want a lesson in Orwell’s “doublethink”, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts or ideas at the same time, you need only read the first line of Cohen’s article: “The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside.” In other words, who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?

Judah Cohen is identified as “the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.” No further details are offered such as the name of the firm or Cohen’s academic credentials. Is he a meteorologist? If so, he is one of the worst I have ever encountered.

It happens that I know quite a few meteorologists and climate scientists. One of them is Joseph D’Aleo, an American Meteorological Society Fellow, and editor of a science-based Internet site, Ice Cap. Suffice to say, D’Aleo has been one of a hardy band of skeptics that have countered the global warming hoax with hard science, frequently dissecting the bogus “science” put forth by government agencies including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and other such sources.

In an article titled “Why We Need a New Global Data Set”, D’Aleo wrote the following:

“As I showed in the first analysis, the long term global temperature trends in their data bases have been shown by numerous peer review papers to be exaggerated by 30% to 50% and in some cases much more by issues such as uncorrected urbanization (urban heat island), land use changes, bad siting, bad instrumentation, and ocean measurement techniques that changed over time.”

“NOAA made matters worse by removing the satellite ocean temperature measurement which provide more complete coverage and was not subject to the local issues except near the coastlines and islands.”

“The result has been the absurd and bogus claims by NOAA and the alarmists that we are in the warmest decade in 100 or even a 1000 years or more and our oceans are warmest ever.”

While Cohen is parroting the World Meteorological Organization’s latest claim that “2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record” in England, the Daily Mail was reporting on December 5 that “Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.”

This parallels the weather occurring now in the U.S. where new low temperature records are being set while cities like Columbia, S.C., had its first significant Christmas snow since weather records were first kept in 1887!

Suffice to say that Cohen’s article repeats the usual blather about melting Artic sea ice while waiting until the very end to admit that “the Eastern United States, North Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinary snowy and cold winters since the turn of the century.”

A word to all who did not study meteorology; the World Meteorological Organization, a creature of the United Nations is also the mother ship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC, responsible for the Kyoto Protocols that called for limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, was totally discredited in 2009 when the exchange of thousands of emails revealed its chief perpetrators of the global warming hoax were manipulating the climate data it reported.

To trust the WMO or IPCC at this point in time is futile and dangerous. To trust the garbage coming out of NOAA, GISS and other government entities purporting to predict the climate is also to trust the Environmental Protection Agency that will announce in January 2011 its plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, claiming they are “causing” a global warming that is not happening.

Americans are being deliberately misled by rogue government agencies with no scientific justification for their continued existence.

As for The New York Times, it is unfit to line the bottom of a canary’s birdcage.

See post here.

ICECAP Note: Judah is a meteorologist and a very bright one. He unfortunately works for a company that depends on government funding for modelling and research. They mistakenly trust the temperature data. Judah also has for years confused cause and effect, claiming the snow in Siberia was the cause of the cold weather when it really is the result of the pattern that causes the cold weather. Since snow starts there early, it is a an early indicator of what might be ahead. He should look at sun and ocean cycles for an even earlier indicator. The low solar and a warm Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation lead to more arctic melt and correlate with a tendency for a negative AO, NAO, which lead to cold and snow in Eurasia and eastern US. He also mistakenly claims that ocean warmth drives the climate models when really models don’t handle ocean cycles well at all, can’t reproduce El Nino and La Nina nor the multidecadal cycles. Modelers have tuned the models to have greenhouse forcing drive the climate - both oceans and land.

Earth’s stratosphere is as clear as it’s been in more than 50 years. University of Colorado climate scientist Richard Keen knows this because he’s been watching lunar eclipses. “Since 1996, lunar eclipses have been bright, which means the stratosphere is relatively clear of volcanic aerosols. This is the longest period with a clear stratosphere since before 1960.” Consider the following comparison of a lunar eclipse observed in 1992 after the Philippine volcano Pinatubo spewed millions of tons of gas and ash into the atmosphere vs. an “all-clear” eclipse in 2003:

Keen explains why lunar eclipses can be used to probe the stratosphere: “At the distance of the Moon, most of the light refracted into the umbra (Earth’s shadow) passes through the stratosphere, which lies 10 to 30 miles above the ground. When the stratosphere is clear, the umbra (and therefore, the eclipsed Moon) is relatively bright. On the other hand, if the atmospheric lens that illuminates the Moon becomes dirty enough, light will be blocked and the eclipse will appear dark.”

This is timely and important because the state of the stratosphere affects climate; a clear stratosphere “lets the sunshine in” to warm the Earth below. At a 2008 SORCE conference Keen reported that “The lunar eclipse record indicates a clear stratosphere over the past decade, and that this has contributed about 0.2 degrees to recent warming.”

Keen predicted the appearance of this morning’s eclipse: “The stratosphere is still fairly clear, and the December 21, 2010, eclipse should be normally bright. I welcome any and all reports on the brightness of future lunar eclipses for use in my volcano-climate studies. While actual brightness measurements (in magnitudes) made near mid-totality are most useful, I can also make use of Danjon-scale ratings of the eclipse. Please be sure to note the time, method, and instruments used in your reports.” Submit your observations here.

ICECAP Note: See how the temperatures react to low versus high aerosol content in the stratosphere here and below.

In this season of giving, it is worthy to note the generosity of the Virginia legislature to the renewable-energy lobby. State Sen. Frank Wagner’s website lists his visionary Virginia Energy Plan (VEP), passed in the 2006 Virginia General Assembly, during the heyday of climate change hysteria.

Gov. Tim Kaine’s 2008 roving Climate Change Commission sought vindication for various imagined catastrophes arbitrarily attributed to man-made climate change. The commission considered it axiomatic that climate change was man-made and resulted from fossil fuel usage; the validity of that assumption justified by “science is settled” U.N. reports and Kaine’s views. The final commission report included recommendations for increased use of renewable fuel sources and energy conservation. Higher consumer utility cost was seen as a desirable incentive for lowered energy usage.

The next year brought Climategate and evidence of climate science malfeasance, collapse of the U.N. Copenhagen climate-change agenda, recognition of 10 years of flat temperatures since 1998, and public awareness that dire forecasts of global climate catastrophes never materialized.

The McDonnell administration has brought changes to the commonwealth. However, the 2010 VEP still carries the imprimatur of Wagner and the favored place given renewable energy at the cost of the under-represented Virginia taxpayer.

Financial failure of green-jobs projects in Spain is ignored. Al Gore has recanted his support for corn ethanol, explaining it as a political calculation of the moment. Yet, McDonnell and Wagner continue to play Santa with taxpayer monies by promoting legislation for offshore wind power even though the 2010 VEP characterizes the 12.5 to 22.5 cents per kilowatt hour price as “not cost effective.” Massachusetts’ Cape Wind project imposes a ratepayer cost premium for wind of 2 to 3 over conventional fuels. Little mention is made of necessary, additional conventional-powered plants to provide base load when the wind fails.

Ho,ho,ho!

(No, No, No!)