Al Gore, the King Canute of our age, is about to spend hundreds of millions of other people’s dollars on a “global warming” awareness campaign, says the Science and Public Policy Institute, which offers some questions that Gore’s fellow religionists at CBS won’t ask him on 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 30:

If you’re so confident we face a “climate crisis”, why do you only appear on shows like 60 Minutes, where tame journalists lob you pre-agreed softball questions? Why don’t you ever take unscripted questions from the audience when you appear in public for $250,000 speaking fees? Why don’t you dare to publicly debate Lord Monckton, who challenged you a year ago?

Why do you say “global warming” is getting worse when in fact it has stopped; for ten years, average temperatures on Earth have not risen; and for seven years, the trend has been downward? Do you agree with Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s climate panel, who says it had better find out where it got its sums wrong? Or with Lord Lawson, the former UK Treasury secretary, who says the panel should be scrapped?

How much money have you made out of “global warming” since 2004? Doesn’t your “Armageddon scenario” constitute the and appearance and actual possibility of racketeering by peddling a false prospectus for your “Green” investment management corporation and your many other financial interests?

Says SPPI President, Robert Ferguson, “Those truly interested in learning the facts and science about Al Gore’s self-interested scare campaign, facts you won’t get on 60 Minutes, get Apocalypse? No!, the fast-paced, fact-filled feature-length movie that puts Al Gore in his place and the climate scare in perspective, at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/apocalypseno-dvd.html “ See full release here.

This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I study weather stations here. I carry a thermometer. My name’s Anthony. The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The day was Monday, March 24th, four days after the vernal equinox. It started out like any other day, with a bad cup of coffee and a stack of reports on scumbags your normally wouldn’t give the time of day to. But then, just as I was about to down that last gulp of coffee, a tip came in on the email hotline. It was Goetz, and his side kick Foutch.  They said there has been a heist of a weather station on the southeast side. It had been moved, and then it mysteriously showed up on the campus of USC.

9:15AM:  Goetz and Foutch told me they had picked up the trail of the weather station the night before. They knew it had been bagged, and that some g-men were hopping mad about it. The g-men had written a report on the crime. In it, they claimed that because of the heist, which had been orchestrated by some other g-men at NOAA, the great City of Los Angeles had been denied it’s due: A new rainfall record year of 2004-2005. Worse than that, the temperature of the city was going down.

Follow Anthony on his very funny day long sleuth into the movement of the station from a totally inappropriate location to a much better though not ideal location at the USC campus. See the results after the change (in blue) below.

See full size image here

Read the whole humorous adventure with pictures as evidence galore here. Just the facts ma’am.

There has been an on-going battle between Realclimate and Climate Audit over the past few years. Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of course were of the first to blow the whistle on the now totally debunked hockey stick. Realclimate was formed to try and save face and find a way to breathe life back into the corpse. They continue to post flawed papers that Steve McIntyre quickly dispels. They continue to use the same bad data and methods. They recently enlisted the support of a hired gun known as Tamino, a psuedonym who hosts his own blog and haunts other sites with his insightless alarmist comments. Tamino by the way was a prince who played a magic flute in one of Mozart’s operas.

He posted recently thinking he found the answer. Again it was like taking a stick (no doubt from a bristlecone pine tree or Gaspe cedar) to a gunfight as his argument was quickly demolished by Steve in this post.  CO2 Science meanwhile has also compiled many peer-review papers supporting the Medieval Warm Period that had vanished in the hockey stick. In mid-February CO2 Science experienced a terrorist-like Denial of Service Attack on their website that rendered it inaccessible to patrons. Unfortunately, the company that managed our website was unable to stop the attack, and they had to make the decision to host their website elsewhere. Moving a website to another server is not a simple task and must take place in stages. For now, only the current weekly issue of CO2 Science is accessible, followed by a gradual return to full website access and functionality in the coming days and weeks. It shows you the lengths some will go to stop the truth from being heard. But it will be heard.

Face it Mann and friends, you favorite sport may be hockey, but the hockey stick is dead. May it finally rest in peace. We only hope the day will come when Tamino will come to the services wearing his Foster Grants and maybe playing taps on his magic flute.

See full size image here

Update: Madison has exceeded the century mark with 100.4 inches now for the season. For a very funny video song about the heavy winter snows and cold winter in the central and global warming see this on youtube

The 2007-08 winter season has been incredibly snowy...with all locations in south-central and southeast Wisconsin exceeding their normal snowfall for an entire winter season by the end of February, 2008.  It’s safe to say that by the end of the winter many locations will be in the 85 to 100 inch plus range - more than double a normal winter snowfall.  So we are talking about many, new, all-time winter snowfall records being set this winter - one for the ages! 

As of 7 am CDT, March 24nd, the Dane County Regional Airport has recorded 100.4 inches of snowfall, exceeding the century mark for the first time in recorded history. Below is a list of the top 10 winter season snowfall amounts for Madison.

RANK AMOUNT SEASON

1 100.4 2007-08
2 76.1 1978-79
3 75.9 1885-86
4 73.7 1993-94
5 72.4 1985-86
6 71.2 1992-93
7 70.9 1909-10
8 70.7 1897-98
9 67.4 1970-71
10 67.3 1958-59

See full size map here.

As of 7 am CDT, March 22nd, General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee had recorded 96.9 inches of snowfall.  This amount ranked as the 2nd snowiest winter season on record at Milwaukee.
See the full story here. With below normal temperature and an unsettled weather pattern continuing, official snowfall in Milwaukee is expected to edge its way closer to first place and possibly reach the blue ribbon by April 1st.

Also note Ann Arbor, MI with this latest storm eclipsed their all-time snow record. Records there extend back to 1880.

The January 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the Meteorology Society published a Review by Stanley A. Changnon of our book “ Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp.” The review is available here. Here is an excerpt:

This book ranks as one of the most informative and satisfying books I have ever read. it presents a wealth of information about the atmospheric sciences. The honest, unbiased assessments of the myriad conflicting views about weather modification and global climate change simply cannot be found elsewhere in a single document. I strongly recommend this book to all atmospheric scientists-it is a must read!

The book will also be very informative to scientists in many fields, as well as engineers dealing with weather and climate. Its contents carry useful messages for policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels.

One of the things learned from the www.surfacestations.org project is how the conversion of standard mercury thermometers in Stevenson Screens to the newer MMTS type electronic thermometers has resulted in many USHCN stations being placed closer to buildings. This is a result of cable trenching issues and NWS COOP managers general lack of equipment and time to do effective cable laying. The spec for the MMTS thermometers allows for cables up to 1/4 mile in length between the sensor and the display.

On the other side of town we have the official USHCN climate station of record there, COOP # 253715 located at the Mirage Flats irrigation District Office. While you’d think that the rural “great plains nature” of this station would provide for a better environment, like the one above, it is also at about 5 feet from the building, but doesn’t have shrubbery affecting daytime sun and nighttime reflected IR like the other station.

In either case, the placement so close to heated buildings certainly doesn’t provide what would be considered a quality measurement environment for temperature. According to the NCDC database records, the USHCN station was converted from a Stevenson Screen to a MMTS in 1989. One of the hopes I have as we survey more stations in the midwest is that we’ll find better quality siting and placements. I hope these examples are not indicative of what we’ll find in the great plains. See the full blog and close-up photos here.

The MMTS thermometer in the photo above is no exception to this problem (if you can find it). This station above is in the middle of America’s agricultural belt, in Hay Springs, Nebraska. It is a standard COOP station #253710 at an observer’s residence. It is a Class “A” station according to NCDC so data from it does make it into the climate record.

There was a candid admission in the newspaper Colorado Daily on February 22 2008 with respect to why the global warming issue is being promoted so vigorously in the media and in articles published in science journals. The text from the article “Carbon dioxide: friend or foe? by Evan Sandsmark” has the relevant excerpt:

“Many individuals, including a large portion of environmentalists, believe that a purely technological approach to stablizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could lead to social apathy towards climate change. Ted Parsons, a professor at the School of National Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, writes that the promises of air capture could carry a ‘moral hazard’ because political pressure for near-term efforts to curtail climate change may be reduced. Air capture also addresses one of many factors adversely affecting the environment. The climate crisis is a powerful tool to motivate change - like checking the ever-expanding global population and excessive resource consumption - and if the urgency of climate change is compromised, other environmental projects may fall by the wayside.”

Thus we have the reasoning as to why the science issues on Climate Science have been mostly ignored - the issue is not about climate science. The goal is to use the term “global warming” (with “climate change” used to make the concept cover all aspects of climate) not to “motivate” change, but to force the public and policymakers to adopt specific policy and political actions that promotes particular agendas.

Clearly, this narrow approach is doomed to produce poor policy decisions. Unless the media starts to recognize this inappropriate use of climate science, we will continue down the road to many actions that will have unanticipated and undesirable consequences. Read Roger’s full post here.

We live in an invisible atmospheric sea of water vapor, Earth’s primary greenhouse gas. Our atmosphere could hold much more water vapor than it does, which would then lead to a much warmer Earth—but it doesn’t. So, why is the greenhouse effect limited to its current value? We don’t know; scientists simply “assume” that it magically stays that way.

Current computerized climate models that predict large amounts of global warming only do so after making very crude and uncertain assumptions about how the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is maintained. In the following article I will explain why I believe that modern science can not say with any level of confidence how much of our current global warmth is caused by mankind without knowing why the Earth’s greenhouse effect is limited to its current value.

In the following article I will explain why the answer to this question must be through the operation of precipitation systems, for only they can remove water vapor from the atmosphere. Even though all climate models DO contain the “average effects” of precipitation systems—this is NOT the same as knowing how precipitation systems interactively regulate the climate system. ”Recent Evidence for Reduced Climate Sensitivity”, my PowerPoint slideshow was presented on Tuesday, March 4, at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, Marriott Marquis Times Square, New York City.

See full size image here

Icecap Note: Roy’s presentation at the conference was excellent. Note how his important research showing that the water vapor feedback appears to be negative and not positive as we find in all the climate models, has been published in the GRL in 2007 and acepted for publication in the Journal of Climate for 2008. The concept is very well described in the powerpoint and in more detailed form on the Global Warming and Nature’s Thermostat site.