Your humble correspondent has a bit of friendly advice for President-elect Barack Obama. On Inauguration Day, drop any mention of “Global Warming.” The latest weather forecast predicts that Washington, D.C. will have a high of below freezing at 30 degrees and a low of 20 degrees. It is still unknown how low the wind chill factor will be in discomforting the inaugural onlookers. To chance mentioning “global warming” or even “climate change” risks incurring the wrath of what onlookers have termed the Gore Effect which was noted by Politico:  For several years now, skeptics have amusedly eyed a phenomenon known as “The Gore Effect” to half-seriously argue their case against global warming.  The so-called Gore Effect happens when a global warming-related event, or appearance by the former vice president and climate change crusader, Al Gore, is marked by exceedingly cold weather or unseasonably winter weather.

Image courtesy of the Energy Tribune.

For instance, in March, 2007, a Capitol Hill media briefing on the Senate’s new climate bill was cancelled due to a snowstorm.  On Oct. 22, Gore’s global warming speech at Harvard University coincided with near 125-year record-breaking low temperatures. And less than a week later, on Oct. 28, the British House of Commons held a marathon debate on global warming during London’s first October snowfall since 1922.  While there’s no scientific proof that The Gore Effect is anything more than a humorous coincidence, some climate skeptics say it may offer a snapshot of proof that the planet isn’t warming as quickly as some climate change advocates say.  “You can’t fool Mother Nature,” said climate skeptic scientist and meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo. “We used to kid in forecasting that whenever we were very certain about a major forecast, it would wind up being so dead wrong that we’d be embarrassed. It certainly makes you think.” Tracking The Gore Effect “doesn’t contribute much to the actual making of policy,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican spokeswoman Lisa Miller. But it “can be fun.” Obama has already been a victim earlier today of the Gore Effect when he talked about Global Warming in freezing Philadelphia as reported by Marc Sheppard of the American Thinker: In the first speech of his “whistle-stop” tour to Washington, Barack Obama talked global warming to a crowd of shivering Philadelphians who braved 18 degree (sub 10 degree wind-chill) temperatures on their journey to the 30th Street Train Station. It’s hard to believe that, given the arctic-like temperatures the northeast has suffered through this winter, the president-elect didn’t instruct his writers to reword this passage from his “historic” speech: “Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. Two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely. A planet that is warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil.”

I know—severe weather patterns in either direction are not symptomatic of overall climate trends, and I generally resist the temptation to report so-called “Gore Effect” events.  But following a year predicted to be the “hottest in a century” that turned out instead to be the coolest in a decade, you’d think that—given the extraordinarily glacial locale— the supposedly brilliant future leader of the free world would have appreciated the hysterical disconnect in his words. Not to mention the tough road ahead in selling his plan to legislate commerce-and-lifestyle-altering sacrifice to confront an unproven crisis with wholly hypothetical remedies to a cash-strapped and freezing populace. So has Obama learned his lesson from his Philadelphia Gore Effect fiasco? Or will he tempt the fates by again referring to Global Warming this Tuesday? In any event, it will be interesting to see if the mainstream media will report on the irony of Obama warning of Global Warming to a freezing crowd. Oh, and one final piece of advice, Mr. President-elect. Spare yourself even more humiliation by keeping Al Gore well away from the podium. Should his face appear in the crowd of dignitaries the Gore Effect is sure to send the temperatures plummeting even more than is already predicted. Read Newsbusters story here.

2008 was a bad year for global warming alarmists. Their credibility has been entirely destroyed by none other than Mother Nature. As George W. Bush leaves office, the world is actually cooler than it was when he came in. Lacking facts, the Gorian Gaggle is trying to tie anyone who disagrees with their propaganda to the most evil of all industries (in their eyes): the tobacco producers. Before, anyone who disputed their prophesying of a future calamity was merely a “Holocaust denier.” That didn’t work, so now, we’re all labeled “tobacco scientists.”

Why is it that everything these people say sounds as if it’s echoing up from the playground or lifted from a note passed in study hall?  When I have appeared on television jointly with the president of Greenpeace USA, he has more than once struggled to yelp a “last word” variant of this “tobacco” theme. Ironically, however, JunkScience.com’s Steven Milloy has documented how it is the greens themselves who have adopted the tobacco industry’s tactics.

These include a strategy of information laundering through ignoring or misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific findings and cherry-picking facts, and attempting to shift the focus away to something other than research based on observation. Finally, of course, is their trademark effort to stifle legitimate debate and silence those who won’t accept their dogma. As John Atkinson points out in the UK newspaper, the Register, “The climate science bandwagon has come about solely because of supposed anthropogenic climate change, which means that their funding is intrinsically tied to climate change happening and being man-made. A more self-interested group I could not find anywhere, even looking at the researchers who were paid by big tobacco companies to tell us cigarettes are safe.”

Further, the premise behind most alarmist slurs, of the “tobacco scientist” variety and the ritual claims of “ties” to “big oil” or “industry,” is that a scientist’s convictions and those of other dissenters are for sale. Yet it is illogical to assume that dissenters can be bought but alarmists cannot. Looking at the balance sheets on both sides, their logic would conclude that the greatest amount of corruption occurs on the alarmist side.

With federal expenditures on climate-related research soaring above $5 billion annually - more than we spend on AIDS or the National Cancer Institute - and hundreds of billions in “rents” to corporations pushing these schemes should the alarmist campaign succeed, the potentially corrupting factor of money cannot be ignored. Someone saw a good investment in giving Al Gore $300 million for his “climate crisis” re-branding campaign. Gore’s advisor (and, officially, NASA astronomer) James Hansen and other activists receive enormous sums of money underwriting their alarmist activities, sums that no “skeptic” has ever been accused of receiving. Meanwhile Gore - the king of claiming that those who disagree are merely in it for the money - makes millions annually from all manner of enterprises premised upon the climate crisis, and his lucre will increase several fold upon passing the laws his alarmism demands.

The difficult truth is that the alarmists cannot logically fault the skeptics’ credibility without also faulting Gore’s credibility, and that of their heavily compensated alarmist mouthpieces. Yet no “skeptic” receives as much as Gore or even Hansen from shouting falsities about the issue. The delicious irony found in the global warming alarmists’ claims is that it is they who closely resemble the “tobacco scientists” they accuse those who oppose them of being, and are quite plainly the ones stuck on “denial”. Until lately people like me agreed with them that the planet warmed about a degree after the end of the Little Ice Age; we “denied” that this simply had to be Man’s doing, and they set about denying past warming and cooling periods, perpetuating a strange fantasy that climate was stable until the horrors of industrialized society. Sounds like the first sign of a problem, no? Read more Green Wacko Tobacco here.

A new study just published in the January 2009 issue of Journal of Climate uses a model to study the effect of warming oceans on the extensive low-level stratocumulus cloud layers that cover substantial parts of the global oceans. This study, entitled “Response of a Subtropical Stratocumulus-Capped Mixed Layer to Climate and Aerosol Changes”, by Peter Caldwell and Christopher Bretherton, is important because it represents a test of climate models, all of which now cause low level clouds to decrease with warming.

And since less low cloud cover means more sunlight reaching the surface, the small amount of direct warming from extra CO2 in climate models gets amplified - greatly amplified in some models. And the greater the strength of this ‘positive cloud feedback’, the worse manmade global warming and associated climate change will be. But everyone agrees that clouds are complicated beasts…and it is not at all clear to me that positive cloud feedback really exists in nature. (See here and here for such evidence).

The new Journal of Climate study addressed the marine stratocumulus clouds which form just beneath the temperature inversion (warm air layer) capping the relatively cool boundary layer to the west of the continents. The marine boundary layer is where turbulent mixing of water vapor evaporated from the ocean surface gets trapped and some of that vapor condenses into cloud just below the inversion.

That warm temperature inversion, in turn, is caused by rising air in thunderstorms - usually far away - forcing the air above the inversion to sink, and sinking air always warms. The inversion forms at a relatively low altitude where the air is ‘prevented’ from sinking any farther. This relationship is shown in their Figure 1, which I have reproduced below.

The authors used a fairly detailed model to study the behavior of these clouds in response to warming of the ocean and found that the cloud liquid water content increased with warming, under all simulated conditions. This, by itself, would be a negative feedback (natural cooling effect) in response to the warming since denser clouds will reflect more sunlight. At face value, then, these results would not be supportive of positive cloud feedback in the climate models. But what is interesting is that the authors do not explicitly make this connection. Even though they mention in the Introduction the importance of their study to testing the behavior of climate models, in their Conclusions they don’t mention whether the results support - or don’t support - the climate models.

And I would imagine they will not be happy with me making that connection for them, either. They would probably say that their study is just one part of a giant puzzle that doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the climate models that predict so much global warming. Fair enough. But a double standard has clearly been established when it comes to publishing studies related to global warming. Published studies that support climate model predictions of substantial manmade global warming are clearly preferred over those that do not support the models, and explicitly stating that support in the studies is permitted.

But results that appear to contradict the models either can not get published or (like in this study) the contradiction can not be explicitly stated without upsetting one or more of the peer reviewers. For instance, a paper I recently submitted to Geophysical Research Letters was very rapidly rejected based upon only one reviewer who was asked to review that paper. (I have never heard of a paper’s fate being left up to a single reviewer, unless no other reviewers could be found, which clearly was not the case in my situation). That reviewer was quite hostile to our satellite-based results, which implied the climate models were wrong in their cloud feedbacks.  Read full post here.

Don’t pay any attention to your frozen thermometer. Never mind that your city is shivering under a record-setting cold wave, paralyzed by another record-setting snowfall. Do not think twice about your mounting heating bill, electricity blackouts, or reports that heating oil deliveries for your area are not available. Even if your teeth are chattering, concentrate only on one thing: global warming, Global Warming, GLOBAL WARMING. Just wrap yourself in a blanket and re-watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. And remember, be very, very afraid ... of global warming.

That seems to be the message coming from much of the overheated “mainstream” news in reports on the cold snap that started the winter of 2008-2009. Agence France Press (AFP) reported on January 8: A cold front is sweeping across Europe after gripping swathes of North America last month, but the deep freeze does not mean the threat of global warming has abated, caution scientists. “The problem is that people are confusing weather with climate,” Susan Solomon, a top scientist on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), said in a recent interview. “Weather is important locally, and from year to year. But what you really have to look at when you are interested in climate is the larger scale - the whole world - and the longer term,” she said. Even if 2008 was on balance chillier than 2007, it still ranks as the 10th warmest year on record, she pointed out.

Funny how that works. Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC “consensus scientists” are keen to draw a distinction (legitimate, by the way - when used legitimately) between local, short-term weather and global, long-term climate, when it suits their agenda. However, the same folks who invoke this point to convince us to pay no attention to global cooling trends are the same ones who pounce on every local weather (and non-weather) anomaly - drought, rain, hurricanes, tornadoes, hail storms, toenail fungus, tooth decay, male pattern balding, stray cats, genocide in Sudan - as “proof” that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming.

But what about the last claim mentioned in the AFP report by the IPCC’s Susan Soloman: “Even if 2008 was on balance chillier than 2007, it still ranks as the 10th warmest year on record”?  That is a claim being repeated in many media reports. Surely, it must be based on reputable data, yes? As it turns out, no; it is more hot air coming out of Britain’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research. Like NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by global-warming alarmist James Hansen, the Hadley Center is a very politicized institution, given to hand-wringing apocalyptics. The dire pronouncements and predictions coming out of Hadley are based on very skewed data sets, as statisticians and scientists have been pointing out for some time (for examples, click here, here, and here).

However, Hadley isn’t alone in this pickle; it turns out that many of the major centers producing temperature data that is used by global-warming modelers are employing questionable data gathering methods. In this regard, meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo writes:

Well the global data bases of NOAA GHCN, NASA GISS and Hadley CRUT3v are all contaminated by urbanization, major station dropout, missing data, bad siting, instruments with known warm biases being introduced without adjustment and black box and man made adjustments designed to maximize warming (Steve McIntyre found more urban areas had their temperatures adjusted up than down). Also ocean temperatures are an issue with a change in the methods of measurement and incomplete coverage. Hadley uses their own merchant ship data and that covers some heavily traveled routes but has no coverage of the vast southern oceans (the oceans cover 70% of the world’s surface).

The biggest issue that is disturbing climate scientists with regard to data is “station dropout,” which is no small matter. It seems that as many as two-thirds of the world’s weather stations ceased reporting around 1990. Many of those were in the rural areas of former Soviet Union (FSU), particularly Siberia. With so many colder stations no longer in the record, it is not surprising that the data would show temperatures rising. And the stations still remaining in the FSU tend to be concentrated in the urban areas, where the “urban heat island effect” produces additional bias for warmer temperatures.

This and other important information contradicting the global warming alarmist “consensus” is leaking out, even into some of the major media. A January 8 op-ed by Robert L. Bradley, for instance, entitled ”Climate-change alarmism runs into a reality check,”The new century has cooled the case for climate alarmism. Global warming has stalled - not accelerated as expected. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have increased, but temperatures have been flat for the last eight years and have slightly fallen since 1998’s El Nino-driven temperature spike.

Britain’s Telegraph offered two important recent pieces on the great global warming crack-up: ”2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved” and ”Global warming: Reasons why it might not actually exist.”

Icecap Note: Thanks to William Jasper for a fine piece. Please also note that NASA MSU satellites according to UAH ranked 2008 as the 14th coldest in 30 years of record, irreconcilable with Solomon and Hadley’s ludicrous claims it was the 10th warmest year since 1850.  It proves the global data bases are contaminated as I, Steve Mcintyre, Roger Pielke, Anthony Watts, Ross McKitrick, Pat Michaels and many others have been showing.

As environmentalism continues to grow in prominence, more and more of us are trying to live a “greener” lifestyle. But the more “eco-friendly” you try to become, the more likely you find yourself confused and frustrated by the green message.

Have you tried giving up your bright and cheery incandescent light bulbs to save energy only to learn that their gloomy-but-efficient compact fluorescent replacements contain mercury? Perhaps you’ve tried to free up space in landfills by foregoing the ease and convenience of disposable diapers only to be criticized for the huge quantities of energy and water consumed in laundering those nasty cloth diapers. Even voicing support for renewable energy no longer seems to be green enough, as angry environmentalists protest the development of “pristine lands” for wind farms and solar power plants.

Why is it that no matter what sacrifices you make to try to reduce your “environmental footprint,” it never seems to be enough? Well, consider why it is that you have an “environmental footprint” in the first place. Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being, every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives comes from altering nature for our own benefit.

From the perspective of human life and happiness, a big “environmental footprint” is an enormous positive. This is why people in India and China are striving to increase theirs: to build better roads, more cars and computers, new factories and power plants and hospitals. But for environmentalism, the size of your “footprint” is the measure of your guilt. Nature, according to green philosophy, is something to be left alone to be preserved untouched by human activity. Their notion of an “environmental footprint” is intended as a measure of how much you “disturb” nature, with disturbing nature viewed as a sin requiring atonement. Just as the Christian concept of original sin conveys the message that human beings are stained with evil simply for having been born, the green concept of an “environmental footprint” implies that you should feel guilty for your very existence.

It should hardly be any surprise, then, that nothing you do to try to lighten your “footprint” will ever be deemed satisfactory. So long as you are still pursuing life-sustaining activities, whatever you do to reduce your impact on nature in one respect (e.g., cloth diapers) will simply lead to other impacts in other respects (e.g., water use) like some perverse game of green whack-a-mole and will be attacked and condemned by greens outraged at whatever “footprint” remains. So long as you still have some “footprint,” further penance is required; so long as you are still alive, no degree of sacrifice can erase your guilt. The only way to leave no “footprint” would be to die—a conclusion that is not lost on many green ideologues. Read more here.

From illegal immigration and trade to voter fraud, CNN’s Lou Dobbs is never shy about expressing his opinions. That rule held true when Dobbs brought up global warming on Jan. 5. The outspoken host of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” observed that global warming activists treat their belief in global warming like a religion following a segment about the issue by CNN correspondent Ines Ferre.

“The one issue here, and as we have examined and reported on the issue of global warming, uh, it is so clear that on both sides, but particularly the pro-global warming, if there’s such a thing, uh, if I can put it that way, uh, there, they bring this thing to a personal belief system,” Dobbs said. “It’s almost a religion without any question.” Dobbs noted how “miniscule” man’s impact on the climate is compared to other factors, specifically sunspot activity. “And what we are watching now - we’re in the second year of the solar sunspot activity cycle - an 11-year cycle and many scientists are saying, “My gosh, compared to what our sun can do - man has miniscule influence,” Dobbs said.

Dobbs also said that data is cherry-picked to make the case for global warming alarmism. “Well, passionate - we’re all concerned about this planet. We’re concerned about our atmosphere, our air, our water and our children’s, uh, futures,” Dobbs said. “But, there seems to be such a crowding out of facts and objective assessment of those facts, uh, and as the scientist - the climatologist in your report suggested - there’s such selective choices of data, as one discusses and tries to understand the reality of the issues that make up global warming.”

The climatologist Dobbs referenced from Ferre’s report was Joseph D’Aleo - the executive director of International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP) (http://icecap.us). ICECAP is one of 33 groups co-sponsoring The Heartland Institute’s 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10.

“We are too short-sighted or certainly, uh, those who believe in it, are not looking at the big picture, which needs to include other factors, the natural cycles in the ocean and the sun that are the real drivers,” D’Aleo said.

Ferre alluded to the $175 “cow tax” that some farmers feel is a possibility and could increase their operating costs. “Some farmers fear future regulations on greenhouse gas emissions could include what could amount to a cow tax,” Ferre said. “The United Nations calculates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.” Ferre said the Environment Protection Agency has denied it is considering a tax on livestock.

However, Rick Krause, senior director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau, told the Business & Media Institute it is a possibility - especially based on the rhetoric of President-elect Barack Obama and the use of the EPA to combat global warming. Such action by an Obama administration would take an act of Congress for livestock to be exempt. “The new president has been on record as saying that he really supports regulating greenhouse gases out of the Clean Air Act,” Krause said to the Business & Media Institute. “So, we really have to keep an eye on it. Legislation would really be the only way to exempt it at this point - the cow tax.”

Though the ice may be melting around the edges of the Greenland Icecap in recent years during the warm mode of the AMO much as it did during the last warm phase in the 1930s to 1950s, snow and ice levels continue to rise in most of the interior. Johannessen in 2005 estimated an annual net increase of ice by 2 inches a year. (Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland, Ola M. Johannessen, Kirill Khvorostovsky, Martin W. Miles, Leonid P. Bobylev, Science Express on 20 October 2005 Science 11 November 2005: Vol. 310. no. 5750, pp. 1013 – 1016, DOI: 10.1126/science.1115356)

A Canadian Icecap emailer noted during the cold war there were two massive radar sites built on the Greenland icecap now abandoned. They are called Dye-2 and Dye-3. When built they sat high above the snow, recent pictures show how the snow is building up around them, proving the snow build-up in recent times. This demonstrates this snow accumulation over time.

Dye-2 and 3 were among 58 Distance Early Warning Line radar stations built by America between 1955-1960 across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Iceland at a cost of billions of dollars. Their powerful radars monitored the skies constantly in case Russia decided to send bombers towards America. After extensive studies in late 1957, the USAF selected sites for two radar stations on the ice cap in southern Greenland. Dye-2 was to be built approximately 100 miles east of Sondrestrom AB and 90 miles south of the Arctic Circle at an altitude of 7, 600 feet, and Dye-3 was to be located approximately 100 miles east of DYE II and slightly south at an elevation of 8,600 feet.

The selected locations for the new radar sites were found to receive from three to four feet of snow fall each year. Since the winds were constantly blowing with speeds as much as 100 mph, this snow accumulation constantly formed large drifts. To overcome this potential problem, it was decided that the Dye sites should be elevated approximately twenty feet above the surface of the ice cap.

Dye 3 was built in 1960. From a distance the structure, with its onion-shaped dome, looks like a Russian orthodox church. Dye 3 was an ice core site and previously part of the DEW line in Greenland.  (The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line: A Bibliography and Documentary Resource List Arctic Institute of North America, Page 23). As a Distant Early Warning line base, it was disbanded in years 1990/1991. The Dye 3 cores were part of the GISP (Greenland Ice Sheet Project initiated in 1971) and, at 2037 meters, was the deepest of the 20 ice cores recovered from the Greenland ice sheet as part of GISP. Samples from the base of the 2km deep Dye 3 and the 3km deep GRIP cores revealed that high-altitude southern Greenland has been inhabited by a diverse array of conifer trees and insects within the past million years. (Eske Willerslev, et al. (2007) Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores Reveal a Forested Southern Greenland Science 317 111-114)

The first image below is from 1972.

See larger image here.

Here it is in 2006.

See larger image here.

In looking back at the time the sites were abandoned, one console operator lamented “We were very busy during this time and I was sad to see it end. I remember thinking of all the waste,” he said. The site is slowly disappearing into the snow. Its outbuildings are no longer visible and drifting snow will consume it completely one day, but that day appears to be decades away.” Read more here.

The debate over global warming heated up in 2008, with prominent meteorologists, scientists, and environmentalists dissenting from the so-called consensus for “manmade” global warming. First there was John Coleman—the founder of the Weather Channel. In a speech delivered in March, Coleman questioned the validity of so-called “manmade” global warming. He also called into question the notion of a carbon credit system and stated that those who sell them could be committing financial fraud. “There is no human-caused global warming as a result of CO2—and all these carbon credits, which they’re selling for millions of dollars, are based on CO2 forcing, they call it, causing global warming,” said Coleman. “Well, that’s not valid, and they’ve got to know it—and if they know it and they’re selling those carbon credits, aren’t they committing financial fraud?”

In May, OneNewsNow talked with AccuWeather.com senior meteorologist Joe Bastardi, who posted an open letter to the presidential candidates urging them to have an honest debate with top scientists from both sides of the global-warming argument. “People are trying to play God by saying, ‘Oh, this computer model told me 50 years from now that this is going to happen.’ That’s an arguable point; I think we should debate it,” said Bastardi. “But to say that someone has absolute knowledge of the future seems to me to be playing something more than a mortal—and I’m in the business of forecasting the weather.” Bastardi wrote in his open letter that the recent cold winter of 2007 may be a preview of what is coming. And he argued that making it illegal to obtain oil from an area that could wean America from foreign oil because of a “problem that may not exist” should show people that this position is not driven by science but what may be “an almost fanatical madness.”

In June, OneNewsNow heard from noted environmentalist and author Lawrence Solomon, who pointed out that extremely low sunspot activity and extended periods of no sunspot activity experienced in 2008 could point to a cooling trend. “There has been a coincidence over the centuries of an absence of sunspots correlating with very cold temperatures and a presence of sunspots corresponding to a warm period,” he explained. Solomon also noted that temperatures have dropped by more than a half a degree centigrade last year, which is equivalent to more than a century’s worth of warming.

Another natural fluctuation is arctic sea ice. In 2007, arctic sea ice hit a summertime low of 1.65 million square miles. However, at that same time in 2008 there were 2.03 million square miles of the ice. Scientist Joseph D’Aleo of IceCap.us weighed in on the situation. “I don’t believe it has anything at all to do with global warming, or at least carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases,” D’Aleo offered. “It’s a normal cyclical change that we’ve observed in the Arctic going back centuries."The arctic ice diminished in the [19]30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. It diminished in the 1800s, so much so that the Northwest Passage was open and they were catching cod fish off of Siberia.” D’Aleo noted that the Pacific Ocean has cooled to pre-1977 temperatures, and he believes the Atlantic will follow within a decade. He added that sea ice will recover and possibly increase as a result.

See full story here.