By Joseph D’Aleo, Fellow of the American Meteorological Society

As part of a well thought out and executed plan to convince the public there is global warming despite the cold and snow records of the last two years, get state climate action plans approved, keep the grant gravy train rolling through the university systems, and get government legislation or carbon control legislation approved that will benefit Wall Street and the government at our expense is underway.

Detailed well produced reports are being dribbled out state by state warning of a ridiculously warm and severe climate future. They are based on the same climate models which have failed miserably in the first decade showing strong warming while the globe cooled, sea levels accelerating up while they have stopped rising and heat records increasing in frequency while we have had fewer heat records in any decade since the 1800s, and disappearing snow while all time snow records occurred in the last two years. But don’t confuse the issue with facts. These reports are timed to affect the decisions made by congress w/r to Cap-and Tax.

Dr. Anthony Lupo reported on one such story in Missouri last month here. He starts “In late July, a document was released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) regarding the kind of future that Missouri faces as a result of global warming. This is part of a series of reports they’ve issued about climate change in the Midwest. Global warming is an issue that has gained more attention than usual within the last year, culminating in the late June passage by the US House of Representatives of the Waxman - Markey Clean Energy and Security Act. This has stimulated debate about combating climate change.

In the local newspaper, an alarmist scientist from the University of Illinois was quoted that we face a 14 degree Fahrenheit increase in summer temperatures as he relayed information from the UCS document “Confronting Climate Change in the US Midwest”. He stated this as if it were a done deal, especially if we continue emitting carbon dioxide at the same rate we are today. This kind of hyperbole then becomes accepted by the media as reality, and comes with the implication that things are worse than we thought. These exaggerated claims are no doubt behind subsequent alarmist editorials in other major newspapers advocating even more severe measures than Waxman - Markey.” Read Tony’s response.

And last week, while I enjoyed a college reunion at my alma mater in Madison, WI, two University of Wisconsin environmental professors published a story in the local newspaper, Study Reveals Dynamic Wisconsin Climate, Past and Future. They start “If the future scenarios being churned out by the world’s most sophisticated computer climate models are on the mark, big changes are in store for Wisconsin’s weather during the next century. Using a realistic estimate of future global carbon emissions, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are forecasting significantly warmer winters, altered patterns of precipitation and more severe weather events for the Badger state.” Those changes, according to the Wisconsin researchers, will be layered on a climate that, based on temperature and precipitation measurements from around the state over the past 60 years, has already warmed 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, and 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.

The enlarged image is here.

“Looking into the future, we are anticipating that by 2050 Wisconsin will have an annual mean warming of between 4 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Dan Vimont, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, who, along with colleagues Chris Kucharik, David Lorenz and Michael Notaro, developed estimates of the state’s future climate as well as a chart of climate change in Wisconsin’s recent past.”

Icecap Note: The map above shows the change since 1950, this is the same cherry picking trick Phil Mote, formerly state climatologist in Washington State and now Oregon did while examining western United States and Canada did. Starting in 1950, a very cold and snowy year at the start of the cold PDO and ending at the warm and dry end of the warm PDO ensured a warming and reduction in western snowpack. When Oregon’s former state climatologist George Taylor pointed out that if he had started 50 years earlier, he would have seen cycles but no trend, George was attacked, when Assistant State Climatologist Mark Albright found the same, he was stripped of his title.

The same holds for Wisconsin, the cold PDO leads to more La Ninas, cold and snow in winter (exhibit A the last two years), spring flooding and severe weather and the warm PDO warmer, less snowy winters. With the 60 year PDO cycle, the temperatures can be seen to cycle up and down. You can see in the following NCDC plots for the North Central, cyclical variations - with some rise in January and July since 1950 but no measurable trends over the whole record.

Larger image here.

Larger image here.

The Milwaukee NWS also recently took a look at the long-term temperatures observed for Milwaukee (here), and calculated the number consecutive days with temperatures above 32F - that is, the minimum temperature for any calendar day had to be above the freezing mark of 32F.  In a rough sense, looking for the number of consecutive days each year that plants had a chance to grow or survive.  We found some interesting trends, but in general, there has been a lengthening of the growing season since the 1960s, but we haven’t exceeded what was observed in some of the years during the perod of 1900 to 1934.

If your local newspapers have not reported such a story for your state yet, expect one to come soon. Rest assured they are not based on real science and can be dismissed as propoganda, much as the CCSP, a glossy well produced nonsense document full of lies and mistatements, an embarrassment to NOAA. NOAA is complicit in maintaining an issue by manipulating data (allowing 80% stations to drop out, removing urban adjustment and satellite ocean monitoring, allowing 90% of climate station to have poor siting resulting in an artifical warming of 0.75F for the United States and accounting for most of the warming the last century). All this to counter the emerging evidence the changes are natural and cyclical related to the sun and oceans. President Obama will be defending this man-made global warming nonsense and promising the US (that means you and your family) will go to great pain to deal with this non issue. Keep your cards and letters and phone calls coming to congress to urge them to resist taking unneccesary action.

Update: See this Washington Examiner Op Ed on the Flawed Intelligence Guiding the Obama Energy Policy here.