Based on UN IPCC dogma and according to this Australian website for children, the greenhouse effect is “caused by gases in our atmosphere (especially water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane). They trap energy from the sun’s light and reflect it back to Earth, so we just keep on getting warmer.”

As Alan Siddons points out: “You might as well believe that your image in a mirror can burn your face”. It is palpably absurd, and yet it is an accurate depiction of the theory that the IPCC has foisted on the public - a theory that IPCC critics won’t even attack because, presumably, they believe it too. Moreover, the actual trapping of heat cannot raise an object’s temperature in the first place. It only slows down heat loss. For instance, a polar bear is a living thermos bottle. Its internal body temperature is much the same as ours. But its surrounding fat and fur are such that - and this is remarkable - a polar bear is virtually invisible to a thermal camera. Just like coffee in a thermos, you can’t tell how hot the inside of a polar bear is by looking at it from the outside. But neither does coffee in a thermos get hotter because its heat is trapped. It just retains its temperature for a longer time. Otherwise, both the polar bear and the thermos would self-ignite.

In short, the earth absorbs enough energy from the sun to reach a certain temperature. Since it radiates the same amount, its temperature obviously isn’t raised by carbon dioxide absorbing some infrared - for CO2 simply releases that energy at the same pace, as satellites attest. But even if CO2 did trap thermal energy, as insulation does (creating an emission discrepancy that would be quite observable to satellites), the earth’s temperature could go no higher than what it began with. To repeat, coffee doesn’t get hotter in a thermos.”

See larger image here

“Why isn’t anyone else shouting from the rooftops about the self-evident absurdity of the IPCC model?” “The acceptance of this ludicrous theory threatens to destroy the western world, yet no so-called skeptic attacks it.” Read more here. See ILoveMyCarbonDioxide here.

See also ”Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics”, Greenhouse Gas Facts and Fantasies, CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time, A Fundamental Analysis of the Greenhouse Effect, Carbon Dioxide- the Houdini of Gases, Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects, Global Warming and Cooling - The Reality , Atmospheric CO2 and Global Warming, and The Lynching of Carbon Dioxide - The Innocent Source of Life.

While the struggle for legal equality has been won, millions of poor and minority families are still seeking economic advancement. Unfortunately, many state and federal policies now attempt to restrict domestic petroleum production and carbon dioxide emissions, by closing off access to energy and raising the cost of energy even higher than today’s already painful levels. These policies, says Congress of Racial Equality chairman Roy Innis, curtail business and employment opportunities, make it harder for poor families to achieve their dreams, and trample on civil rights.

Some policies restrict or prevent access to America’s own extensive and vitally needed energy resources. Others seek to restrict their use, in the name of preventing hypothetical human-caused catastrophic climate change - by steadily increasing the cost of hydrocarbon energy, penalizing its use, or providing mandates and subsidies for “alternative energy.” Each of these policies acts as a huge, regressive tax that will hit small businesses and poor and minority families especially hard - impinging on the economic civil rights that they have struggled so long and hard to achieve.

We hope this thought-provoking and informative article will encourage citizens and legislators to ponder the harmful implications of energy and climate change legislation that will be considered by the US Senate, US House of Representatives and various state legislatures in the coming weeks. Read Roy Innis’s letter here.

Please post it, quote or excerpt from it, edit it for length or tone or to give it a local perspective, translate it, email it to friends and colleagues, or submit it for posting or publication by newspapers, newsletters and other organizations that might have an interest in these important issues. You have permission to do so, if you simply give proper credit. Thank you. You may also want to consider contacting your US senators and other elected officials, to express your concern about pending climate change legislation, the continuation of anti-drilling policies, impediments to coal-generated electricity and further delays in building new refineries and nuclear power plants.  And last, you may want to consider signing the ”Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” petition in support of US domestic energy production.

Roy Innis is chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Energy Keepers - Energy Killers: The new civil rights battle.

Steve McIntyre’s recent Ohio State University presentation is now available online. This is an excellent summary of the ‘Hockey Stick’ debate and the climate debate in general, which extends to 45 pages (including references).

The presentation concludes: So where does that leave us? In my opinion, there are serious and probably fatal problems with the main proxies used as supposed evidence against a warm MWP. The selection of proxies in studies displayed by IPCC seems to me to be biased against proxies with a warm MWP. IPCC itself does not carry out any independent due diligence of the type that might be expected in a prospectus. Further, in 2007, as in 2001, the authors involved in preparing the paleoclimate section were active parties in controversies and, in the end, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report strongly reflects their partisan point of view.

Is there a wider lesson here for engineers? We are often told that the “Science is settled”. But engineers, of all people, know that, even if the “science is settled”, the engineering work may have just begun. One would hardly derive the parameters for a chemical process from an article in Nature without an engineering feasibility study. The most critical question in climate is the estimation of a parameter - is the sensitivity of climate to doubled CO2 1.5, 2.5 or 3.5 deg C? Or could it be 6 deg C or 0.6 deg C?

In some ways, the estimation of such parameters through the development of complicated computer models is reminiscent of activities carried out by engineers. One important difference is that climate scientists typically report their results in highly summary form in journals like Nature, rather than in the 1000-page or 2000-page engineering studies that an aerospace engineering enterprise would produce. Viewed from this perspective, a remarkable aspect of the climate debate has been the seeming inability of the climate science community to narrow confidence intervals on this estimate. In 1979, the Charney Report (National Research Council 1979) estimated the impact at 3 deg C with a 1.5 degree range either way. In 2007, IPCC AR4 estimates are virtually unchanged. With all the improvements in scientific knowledge and all the efforts of climate scientists over the years, why has the improvement of these confidence intervals proved so resistant? I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about. Read more here.

Climate change models predicting a dangerous warming of the world’s atmosphere got a confirming boost Sunday from a study showing parallel trends at altitudes nearly twice as high as Mount Everest. The new research, published in Nature Geoscience, will help remove one of the remaining scientific uncertainties about the general thrust of global warming, the authors and commentators say. Over the last two decades, temperature readings from the upper troposphere—12 to 16 kilometres (7.5 and 10 miles) above Earth’s surface—based on data gathered by satellites and high-flying weather balloons showed little or no increase.

Oft cited by climate change sceptics, these findings were known to be flawed but still challenged the validity of computer models predicting warming trends at these altitudes, especially over the tropics. In the new study, climate scientists Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood of Yale University use a more accurate method to show that temperature changes in the upper troposphere since 1970—about 0.65 degrees Centigrade per decade—are in fact clearly in sync with most climate change models. Rather than measuring temperature directly, which had yielded inconsistent results, they used wind variations as a proxy.

There are approximately ten times fewer discontinuities in wind than in temperature records, making wind measurements a more reliable indicator of long-term trends, notes Peter Thorne of Britain Met Office Hadley Centre in a commentary, also published in Nature Geoscience. The new study “provides ... long-awaited experimental verification of model predictions,” Thorne wrote.  See more here. See also this Science Daily summary noting how working backwards from the winds now reconcile the pesky discrepancy the actually measured temperatures showed with the models.

Icecap Note: We knew this was coming. A rushed, coordinated rebuttle to the papers which have shown no agreement between models and the tropical atmosphere as observed by satellites and weather balloon data. Greenhouse models show significant warming in the middle tropical atmosphere not there in the observations.  First they attempted to find fault in the long used balloon temperature data and now they are using wind as a proxy data set to try and recover the warming not shown by actual temperature and satellite measurements.

Also MIT’s Dr. Lindzen notes correctly “It’s the old story.  If the data don’t match the models, change the data.  As has been pointed out a number of times, the odds of data always changing to get closer to the models are pretty small.”

Post on May 23, 2008 Oh What a Beautiful Morning!
New snow...again, again, again...But it looks beautiful. We use to have the first flowers now. Global warming? Iceage? Weekend jubii!!!

See full size image here.

Posts of May 22, 2008 Iceage?
It snowed all the day........Becoming a litle bit tired of snow.....But I know the weather suddely will change. Actualy the sunshine is breaking through the clouds just now.....This is the land of the extreme. I’ve just finished the previous letter, then the sunshine came back.....From snow to sunshine...twenty minutes....Sunshine tomorrow, the weather forcast says… And week end: “that’s nice”

See full size image here.

Post of May 20, 2008 The Never Ending Story
Trying to clear of the roads of snow. That is the situation all over our setlement Kuummiut. I wonder what would happen when the river start to run? The weatherforcast says snow tomorrow, will it never stop.....Where are the global warming?

See full size image here. See daily blog here.

Many solar scientists expected the new sunspot cycle to be a whopper, a prolonged solar tantrum that could fry satellites and raise hell with earthly communications, the power grid and modern electronics. But there’s scant proof Sunspot Cycle 24 is even here, let alone the debut of big trouble. So far there have been just a couple minor zits on the face of the sun to suggest the old cycle is over and the new one is coming.

The roughly 11-year cycle of sunspot activity should have bottomed out last year, the end of Cycle 23 and the beginning of Cycle 24. That would have put the peak in new sunspot activity around 2012. But a dud sunspot cycle would not necessarily make it a boring period, especially for two solar scientists with the Tucson-based National Solar Observatory.

Two years ago, William Livingston and Matt Penn wrote a paper for the journal Science predicting that this could not only be a dud sunspot cycle, but the start of another extended down period in solar activity. It was based on their analysis of weakening sunspot intensity and said sunspots might vanish by 2015. The paper, rejected in peer review, was never published by Science. Livingston said he’s OK with the rejection. Read more here.

I often am asked in talks or via emails what I would recommend for schools to present the other side of the Climate Change issue to An Inconvenient Truth. I have recommended (and continue to do so) Apocalypse? No! by Lord Christopher Monckton. There is now an excellent second choice video, ”Carbon Dioxide and the “Climate Crisis” - Reality or Illusion?” produced by Sherwood and Craig Idso of CO2 Science.  It is the introductory video into what will be a series of videos that very effectively uses scientists and a heavy dose of peer review to present the case that the alarmist position presented by Gore and Hansen is not at all justified.

As the Idso’s note: “Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, calls the host of negative consequences that he predicts will accompany the on-going rise in the air’s CO2 concentration “a planetary emergency—a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the earth.” James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, similarly claims that the earth “is close to dangerous climate change, to tipping points of the system with the potential for irreversible deleterious effects,” and he contends that “ignoring the climate problem at this time, for even another decade, would serve to lock in future catastrophic climatic change.” Do these dire contentions reflect reality? Or do they portray but a marvelously-crafted and hugely-effective illusion?

The new DVD—Carbon Dioxide and the “Climate Crisis” - Reality or Illusion? (copyright 2008 CO2Science)—explores this perplexing problem through an insightful review of numerous (72 peer-reviewed) scientific studies that have been largely ignored by the world’s climate alarmists, and by illuminating commentary provided by a number of researchers who have spent the better parts of their careers studying the many facets of this complex subject.”

The approximately 53-minute DVD is introduced by the Center’s President, Dr. Sherwood Idso, and its Chairman, Dr. Craig Idso. Sherwood and Craig then with the help of numerous scientists and peer reviewed papers challenge the ability of climate models to reliably predict the future; very effectively refute the claims that the current warming is unprecedented in the Earth’s Climatic History - something they have done well on their web site in the Medieval Warm Period project; demonstrate the total lack of evidence of increased frequency of Extreme Weather Events during the recent warming; show that even the IPCC disputes the claims of Gore and Hansen that Ice Sheet Disintegration is occuring; examine Sea Level Trends in recent studies that totally debunk Hansen’s claims of increased and increasing sea level rises; and finally show that Atmospheric Methane, an important greenhouse gas has actually leveled off and not increased rapidly as most IPCC models have assumed.

Sherwood and Craig weave their comments and easily understood graphics with insightful commentary by a world-class, well-known group of international climate scientists to address each of these topics. After viewing this DVD, you can decide for yourself. Is the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content truly “a planetary emergency—a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the earth”? Or is it something far, far different from what the world’s climate alarmists incessantly claim it is? “ You can acquire the DVD for yourself, your children or school here.

Jasper Kirkby of CERN has published a new paper examining the potential link between cosmic rays and climate.

The paper concludes: Numerous palaeoclimatic observations, covering a wide range of time scales, suggest that galactic cosmic ray variability is associated with climate change. The quality and diversity of the observations make it difficult to dismiss them merely as chance associations. But is the GCR flux directly affecting the climate or merely acting as a proxy for variations of the solar irradiance or a spectral component such as UV?  The most likely mechanism for a putative GCR-climate forcing is an influence of ionisation on clouds, as suggested by satellite observations and supported by theoretical and modelling studies. The satellite data suggest that decreased GCR flux is associated with decreased low altitude clouds, which are known to exert globally a net radiative cooling effect. Studies of Forbush decreases and solar proton events further suggest that decreased GCR flux may reduce high altitude (polar stratospheric) clouds in the Antarctic.

Despite these uncertainties, the question of whether, and to what extent, the climate is influenced by solar and cosmic ray variability remains central to our understanding of the anthropogenic contribution to present climate change. Real progress on the cosmic ray-climate question will require a physical mechanism to be established, or else ruled out. With new experiments planned or underway, such as the CLOUD facility at CERN, there are good prospects that we will have some firm answers to this question within the next few years. Read more of the blog here.