Metrodome Collapses as Blizzard Continues to Pound Midwest

MINNEAPOLIS (Dec. 12)—A storm that spanned parts of eight states continued to dump heavy snow in the upper Midwest on Sunday, collapsing the Metrodome in Minneapolis and forcing numerous road closures.

The storm was moving eastward a day after it dumped 20 inches of snow in some places. A Sunday NFL football game between the New York Giants and the Minnesota Vikings had already been pushed to Monday because the Giants couldn’t get to Minneapolis to play when the inflatable Metrodome collapsed Sunday. It’s uncertain when that game will now be played.

A good Samaritan tries to free a car from the snow Saturday in St. Paul, Minn.

A blizzard warning was in effect Sunday for Chicago and much of northern Illinois, all of Iowa, large sections of southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and smaller areas in North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri and Michigan, according to the National Weather Service. Most of the rest of the region was under a winter storm warning or a hard freeze watch.

Wisconsin authorities issued a statewide no-travel advisory Saturday, citing blizzard and winter storm warnings in nearly every county. The weather was an unexpected burden for one Minnesota man who had pledged to camp out on the roof of a coffee shop to help his daughter’s school raise money.

Hospital executive Robert Stevens donned four layers of long underwear, heavy boots and a down coat before embarking on his quest Friday night. He vowed not to come down until he had raised $100,000, but after reaching the halfway mark Saturday morning, he said he hoped the rest of the money would come fast. He didn’t look forward to spending another night out in the blizzard.

“I think I’ve crossed the line into insanity,” he said. Stevens slept inside a tent surrounded by hay bales, swaddled in a double-insulated sleeping bag as he listened to the winds whip off Lake Minnetonka a block away.

There was a bustling lunch crowd Saturday in the Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis. Collette Dennis, a baker there, was back inside after she and co-workers spent 20 futile minutes trying to free her parked car from a snowdrift. Dennis still hoped to figure out a way to get home to the suburb of Roseville, about 12 miles away - but she also was prepared to stay put. The cafe had no cots, Dennis said, “but we have multiple bags of flour I could sleep on. And I guess at least I won’t go hungry.”

The sinking temperatures were considered even more treacherous than the snow in some places. North Dakota experienced wind chills of 20 degrees below zero Saturday, and the arctic air was expected to drop temperatures below zero by Sunday night throughout the Dakotas and in parts of Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Eastern Minnesota’s Oakdale area got 20 inches of snow Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. The storm was moving eastward, where it dumped about a foot of snow in Chippewa County in northwestern Wisconsin and was expected to drop 20 to 24 inches by Sunday morning in the Eau Claire area.

Lisa McGrath was shoveling her front walk in southeast Minneapolis, but knew she’d likely have to do it again in a few hours. “It’s good exercise - the only exercise I’m going to get today,” McGrath said as she hoisted the shovel.

The State Patrol said there were 76 crashes reported statewide, but none with fatalities or serious injuries, and 319 reports of vehicles sliding off roads. “The areas that were hardest hit are virtually impassable,” said Minnesota State Patrol Lt. Eric Roeske. “So we don’t expect those numbers to go up a whole lot.”

The weather also postponed to Monday an NFL football game that had been set for Sunday between the New York Giants and Minnesota Vikings. The Giants were stuck Saturday night in Kansas City, Mo., after their flight was diverted there with the Twin Cities airport closed because of the snowstorm. See post here.

Cancun Climate Summit Ridiculed in World Press

By Alex Newman

While United Nations global-warming dignitaries were invoking ancient Maya goddesses for help in hammering out a wealth-redistribution “climate” treaty, prominent columnists and publications around the world were heaping scorn and ridicule on the whole COP16 extravaganza currently underway in Cancun - even heralding the end of the whole “scam.”

From the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom, the amount of negative press for the climate hysterics - and their whole expensive confab in Mexico - is growing daily. And as UN leaders and climate negotiators ramp up the fear mongering and propose ever-more ridiculous scams and taxes, the barrage of ridicule will likely continue.

“Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse,” noted Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden in an opinion piece released last week. “The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion.”

And that’s why D.C. bigwigs, who flew into Copenhagen on government jets by the dozens for last year’s global-warming conference, have stayed home this year. “Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes,” explained Pruden, citing the notable absence of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other global-warming alarmists in Congress - most of them far less enthusiastic about the crusade than at this time last year.

“When the thrill is gone, the thrill is gone, as star-crossed lovers have learned through the ages, and when a scam collapses, it stays collapsed,” he concluded. “The thought is enough to warm hearts all across the globe.”

In Canada, newspapers and columnists were equally harsh. “This global-warming/climate-change stuff is a great racket,” wrote Rex Murphy in a piece entitled “Cancun sun speeds decay of global warming charade” for the National Post. He then takes aim at “the class of professional alarmists who’ve been banging on about global warming for close on two decades now” as they hold their extravaganza in a sunny resort city where tourists flock to enjoy the warm weather.

“Perhaps they know that this show of theirs is on its last legs, the jig is up, the great game is over. After the unsuccessful 2009 Copenhagen conference, they had to have realized that even Al Gore and all Al Gore’s grim little men would never be able to put the whole rickety, tendentious machine back together again,” Murphy explained. “After Copenhagen, and especially after Climategate, even the true believers must have lost heart.”

But will Cancun be the last global-warming summit ever? “It’s possible,” Murphy suggested. “And with Japan having walked away from the whole idea of Kyoto, it’s hard to see how they’ll work up the steam for another holiday next year.”

And even in England - where the political class seems obsessed by global warming and carbon taxes even as the snow-covered nation suffers its fourth abnormally cold winter in a row and millions of families have trouble heating their homes - the press has been brutal to the warmists. Columnists for the Telegraph and reporters for the Daily Mail, two of the U.K.’s largest papers, have put the climate crusade to shame.

“The global warming scare may have been fun for the children while it lasted. But the time has come for the joke to be declared well and truly over,” opined Christopher Booker in a column entitled “Cancun climate conference: the warmists’ last Mexican wave” appearing in the Telegraph.

“What we are seeing here is one of the greatest collective flights from reality in the history of the human race,” he noted. “As western Europe shivers to a halt and our energy bills soar through the roof, the time has come when we should all start to get seriously angry with our politicians for being carried away by all this claptrap.”

In a separate piece for the Telegraph published before the COP16, Booker called on Ministers of Parliament to face the cold, hard truth. After blasting British and European politicians for groveling over the discredited theories, he puts a price tag on some of the more outrageous programs. “Not a single MP of any party has yet found the courage to mount a properly briefed challenge to all this lunacy. So what do we pay them for?” he wondered in the column, entitled “The climate change scare is dying, but do our MPs notice?”

The Daily Mail, another prominent British newspaper, also revealed a massive hole in the warmists’ arguments as the Cancun conference was becoming increasingly shrill about the supposed warming. “For the past 15 years, global warming has stopped,” noted the report, calling this fact an “inconvenient” truth in honor of alarmist-in-chief Al Gore. “This isn’t meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise.” “Little by little,” explained the article, “the supposedly settled scientific ‘consensus’ that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.” Next, it cited former climate luminaries - most of whom have since fallen in disgrace - admitting there was indeed a medieval warm period and that “there has been no statistically significant warming” since 1995, in the words of the now-discredited Climategate “scientist” Phil Jones.

“The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple,” the article concluded. “Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?”

Of course, there are still numerous establishment organs pushing alarmist man-made global-warming theories in the United States - the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and the New York Times among the more prominent. Around the world, the situation is similar.

But the number of writers and publications taking a firm stand against the alarmists is steadily growing. Human Events and Canada Free Press have both published scathing pieces about the alarmists and their claims. And around the world, more and more media are risking the ire of bureaucrats and officials to expose the fraudulent warmist hypotheses.

The New American magazine predicted the slow death of the global-warming crusade in an article earlier this year as politicians who supported the hysteria began dropping like flies and the warmists were still licking their wounds from Copenhagen and a devastating series of scandals. But with so much invested in the scam, it will definitely not go down quietly or without a fight. For now, the embattled parade is scheduled to limp on in Durban, South Africa, next year. See post here.

Climate threats and policy

Scientific Alliance Newsletter

Much of northwest Europe is having an unusually cold start to winter (another deadly one - fourth in a row). Admittedly, the British transport network tends to crumble at the first hint of snow, but our near continental neighbours have also suffered disruption. In the meantime, Iceland and Greenland have enjoyed relatively mild weather, so we cannot simply conclude that the northern hemisphere winter is cold and that this therefore puts in doubt the generally-accepted global warming trend. Supporters of the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis rightly argue that it is the longer-term pattern which is important, not short-term weather patterns, however unusual.

The distinction between weather and climate is important. Records for temperature, rainfall, windspeed or whatever are broken somewhere in the world on an almost daily basis. Some maximum and minimum temperature records have stood for many years because they were caused by an atypical coincidence of factors. They tell us nothing about climate unless there is a definite trend over an extended period of time.

Climate itself is not amenable to a simple definition, although it is normally taken to mean the range of typical seasonal weather patterns over a 30 year period. Earlier Springs, for example, can be seen as a sign of a shift in the climate, if such a pattern is consistent over many years. The occasional heatwave or localised flood, on the other hand, are just weather. Shifting jetstream patterns, which have a strong influence on weather patterns in western Europe are one important component of a weather system, but only represent a change in climate if there is an apparently permanent shift north or south.

These distinctions do not, of course, stop the natural human tendency to ascribe a significance to unusual weather patterns which fits their own viewpoint. So, some sceptics will gleefully point to the present cold snap (and even more gleefully at the snow which fell while the UK parliament was voting on the Climate Change bill) as evidence that the IPCC interpretation of climate is wrong. These same people, on the other hand, would dismiss the 2003 heatwave across western Europe (with well-publicised increases in the numbers of elderly people dying in France) as extreme weather caused by a blocked area of high pressure.

On the other hand, for those who subscribe to the mainstream view on the human influence on climate, the interpretation would be reversed. The cold start to winter (following as it does last year’s severe one) is part of the normal variability to be expected. And while most people are careful not to blame global warming for individual weather events, guilt by association is the common position. Thus, 2003 was used by many as an example of what could become the norm in years to come. Meanwhile, there will always be someone prepared to make a link between hurricanes or an unusual monsoon season (with this year’s floods in Pakistan being a case in point) and a warming world.

The distinction between weather and climate is extremely important. Is the Scottish skiing industry just seeing a couple of freak years of good snowfall before it continues a long-term decline, or will a change to colder weather make it a reliable source of income over coming decades? And will those who have invested in English vineyards see a favourable shift in climate which makes them more competitive with continental neighbours or will the English wine industry sink back into obscurity this century?

In truth, no-one knows, although everyone has an opinion. The thousands of negotiators in Cancun are all of the belief that there is a long-term trend towards a warmer world and that the primary driver of that is human activity. With this as a starting point, the goal of most delegates remains to agree a binding commitment to drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. It is accepted that this will not be achieved this year and almost certainly not in 2011, but the strategy remains the same.

Tactically, however, things are very different in Cancun than in the lead-up to Copenhagen. Then, there was still some hope that at least the basics of a post-2012 policy could be agreed. Now, the main aim is to keep the talks alive and relevant for the next couple of years. Once lost, the momentum created over many years would be all but impossible to revive. Inevitably, with so much political and scientific capital invested in the UNFCCC process, many participants are using all the tools available to them to keep the juggernaut rolling forward.

Climate activists and some scientists point to the dangers inherent in a world where average temperatures are 4C or more higher. The latest issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society has the theme ‘Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications’. Keepers of temperature series, including NASA and the UK Meteorological Service, are talking up the likelihood of 2010 being one of the three warmest on record (despite there being two months’ worth of data yet to be included). Some small island states continue to insist that rising sea levels will see their demise, despite evidence that coral atolls have remained just above sea level as water levels have risen steadily over thousands of years.

Clearly the last thing that any of the many vested interests want is for the debate about the scientific evidence and its interpretation to be opened up. If the basic science is regarded as settled, the difficult process of agreeing a mitigation policy has a chance of success. If not, the logical way forward is to take whatever emissions reduction steps which make economic sense anyway (in particular, increasing energy efficiency) while concentrating on effective adaptation in areas which are vulnerable (flood defences, water storage and drought-tolerant crops, for example). And as for the move away from fossil fuels, this will inevitably happen during the 21st Century as extraction becomes more difficult, prices rise and viable alternatives are developed. This makes more sense than betting now on wind and solar power to fulfil a large part of our energy needs, at least with the current state of development.

A lot is at stake for all of us, and the distinction between weather and climate is crucial to this. Given the present impasse in negotiating a post-Kyoto deal, practical policymakers should surely be focussing more on adaptive strategies. The distinction between weather and climate can only be made with hindsight. 

CO2-induced Vegetation Growth Slows Global Warming

World Climate Report

We are continually deluged with talk about positive feedbacks leading to even higher levels of global warming, but aside from the great water vapor debate, we rarely hear much about negative feedbacks which could act to slow the rate of temperature rise.

Well that is about to change.

A new study has identified a negative feedback between carbon dioxide-enhanced vegetative growth and global warming - the denser that vegetation becomes, the greater the cooling influence it has on any global temperature rise. The enhanced vegetation doesn’t offset all of the projected warming, but a sizeable chunk of it - 13% globally, 20% over land areas, and more than 50% over the eastern United States. And this negative feedback is not included in current climate models.

A research team of scientists from NOAA, NASA, and the University of Maryland, led by Lahouari Bounoua set out to study how changing vegetation characteristics induced both directly by enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (recall that CO2 is a plant fertilizer) as well as by climate changes that are favorable for plant growth (increased temperature and/or precipitation) may feedback on the projected climate changes. The authors note that there has been some previous work on this topic, but that their current work (just published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters) uses a different modeling approach and includes plant responses not included in earlier studies.

The Bounoua team coupled a plant vegetation model to a climate model that allowed plant characteristics to change and in turn feedback on the climate system. The model was run for a case of doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration (700ppm).

The biggest changes to the plants were an increase in water use efficiency and an increase in the Leaf Area Index (LAI) (the LAI is the total area of all the upper surface of all the leaves on a tree divided by the area on the ground covered by that tree - the more and larger the leaves, the greater the LAI ). Figure 1 shows that the LAI increased by more than 50% at each of three different scales/regions - all global land areas, U.S.A., and the eastern United States. The increased LAI indicates overall denser, more vigorous, vegetation.

Figure 1. Increase in Leaf Area Index (LAI) in the doubled CO2 scenario. (from Bounoua et al., 2010).

The changes in LAI influence the earth’s carbon cycle and its climate. The authors describe the impacts this way:

[I]ncreases in LAI not only affect the carbon uptake, transpiration and interception rates, but also alter surface albedo and roughness and so affect the exchanges of carbon, energy, water and momentum at the land-atmosphere interface. Furthermore, the model’s vegetation physiological growing season is controlled by low-temperature stress levels below which photosynthesis is inhibited. As temperatures increase with CO2, these stress levels become less severe earlier during the onset of vegetation greening and later during the dormancy phase, increasing thus the length of the growing season.

Clearly a wide range of influence.

And taken together, the net result of the modeled vegetation influences is an overall cooling which offsets some of the modeled CO2-induced warming.

The mechanism is somewhat complex, but basically, the increased LAI intercepts a greater percentage of the incident precipitation and redirects it for use of the vegetation. This has a two-fold impact, 1) it increases evapotranspiration and 2) it decreases the volume of run-off. The former produces a cooling effect on the climate and the latter lessens flash flooding.

While the authors don’t discuss the flooding (or reduction thereof) aspect of their findings, they do look into the temperature effects. Using their climate model (which they admit has a fairly low climate sensitivity), they find that the effect of increasing LAI has a pretty large effect on lessening the CO2-induced warming. Compared with a global average temperature rise of 1.94C (for a CO2 doubling), they find that incorporating climate/vegetation interactions into the model produces a rise of 1.68C - or that increased LAI offsets about 13% of the projected warming on a global average. As you may imagine, the cooling influence is greater when only averaged over land areas. There the non-interactive model produces 2.80C of temperature rise, while the interactive model produces only 2.23C, or some 20% less. The impact can be even larger on regional scales. For instance, over the eastern U.S., Bounoua et al. find that LAI increases from the effects of increasing CO2 act to offset a whopping 52% of the projected warming - a large, noteworthy, and significant (in more ways than one) impact.

The authors sum up their findings this way:

When we combine these interactions in climate simulations with 2 x CO2, the associated increase in precipitation contributes primarily to increase evapotranspiration rather than surface runoff, consistent with observations, and results in an additional cooling effect not fully accounted for in previous simulations with elevated CO2. By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6C. Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2-induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration.

True, these results are produced from a modeling study - but they clearly show that current climate models (which do not incorporate interactive vegetation models) fail to include an important climate feedback.

As eminent climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. is fond of pointing out time and time again over on his excellent blog, the earth’s climate system and its interactions with the rest of the world’s environment are far more complex than current climate models come close to handling - and what’s worse, is that organizations like the IPCC and the EPA, rather than embracing this fact, try to hide it under the rug.

Papers like the new Bounoua et al. study make this plain as day and should be required reading for all folks considering action based on climate model projections.

Reference:

Bounoua, L. et al., 2010. Quantifying the negative feedback of vegetation to greenhouse warming: A modeling approach. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L23701, doi+10.1029/2010GL045338.

SPECIAL REPORT: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

ICECAP NOTE: Another nail in the AGW coffin in the Climate Depot special report below.

Two additional interesting HEADLINES worth noting:

The temperature this morning in Cancun dropped to 51F, breaking the record low for the date of 64 set in 2000. It was also the coldest December morning in Cancun history (old record 52F). Gore must have been there at least in spirit. Recall last year, the IPCC Copenhagen meeting was hit with a blizzard and frigid temperatures. The IPCC moved the meeting to Cancun to avoid another embarrassment and feel the global warmth.

In England, the UKMO’s Dr. Vicky Pope was trapped at Gatwick by a heavy snow on her way to announce 2010 may be the warmest on record. She noted they found some warmth previously undiscovered in the oceans (ocean heat is sneaky that way). Well during the last two weeks (last week of November and first week in December), the temperatures in the longest temperature record in the globe (Central England temperatures (CET) was the coldest in the entire record for that period going back to 1659 (the Little Ice Age).
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Climate Depot

More than 1000 dissenting scientists (updates previous 700 scientist report) from around the globe have now challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. This new 2010 320-page Climate Depot Special Report—updated from 2007’s groundbreaking U.S. Senate Report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus”—features the skeptical voices of over 1000 international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC.

This updated 2010 report includes a dramatic increase of over 300 additional (and growing) scientists and climate researchers since the last update in March 2009. This report’s release coincides with the 2010 UN global warming summit in being held in Cancun.

The more than 300 additional scientists added to this report since March 2009 (21 months ago), represents an average of nearly four skeptical scientists a week speaking out publicly. The well over 1000 dissenting scientists are almost 20 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2010 as the Climategate scandal—which involved the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists—detonated upon on the international climate movement. “I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple,” said noted Princeton Physicist Dr. Robert Austin shortly after the scandal broke. Climategate prompted UN IPCC scientists to turn on each other. UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita publicly declared that his Climategate colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones “should be barred from the IPCC process...They are not credible anymore.” Zorita also noted how insular the IPCC science had become. “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication,” Zorita wrote.

A UN lead author Richard Tol lead author grew disillusioned with the IPCC and lamented that it had been “captured” and demanded that “the Chair of IPCC and the Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups should be removed.” Tol also publicly called for the “suspension” of IPCC Process in 2010 after being invited by the UN to participate as lead author again in the next IPCC Report.

Other UN scientists were more blunt. South African UN scientist declared the UN IPCC a “worthless carcass” and noted IPCC chair Pachauri is in “disgrace”. He also explained that the “fraudulent science continues to be exposed.” Alexander, a former member of the UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters harshly critiqued the UN. “‘I was subjected to vilification tactics at the time. I persisted. Now, at long last, my persistence has been rewarded...There is no believable evidence to support [the IPCC] claims. I rest my case!” See: S. African UN Scientist Calls it! ‘Climate change - RIP: Cause of Death: No scientifically believable evidence...Deliberate manipulation to suit political objectives’ [Also see: New Report: UN Scientists Speak Out On Global Warming—As Skeptics!]

Read much, much more here.

Gore Effect Strikes Cancun

By Dr. Roy Spencer

Today’s my first full day in Cancun at COP-16, and as I emerged from my hotel room I was greeted by a brisk, dry, cool Canadian breeze.

It was 54 deg. F in Cancun this morning (actual low this morning, December 8 dropped to 51F a new daily and December record!) - a record low for the date. (BTW, Cancun is nowhere near Canada).

Al Gore is not supposed to be here...but it could be that the Gore Effect has announced his secret arrival. We will check into this.

The following pic I took pretty much sums up what some are trying to accomplish here:

You might recognize this organization:

Does this photo say something about the future of wind power in Europe?

Even the ghost of John Lennon is here - Give Peas A Chance:

Follow the Cancun conference on Roy’s blog here.

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Cancun Climate Change Summit: Japan, then Canada, Russia and Australia Oppose Extending Kyoto Protocol

The delicately-balanced global climate talks in Cancun suffered a setback at the outset when Japan categorically opposed extending the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Jun Arima, an official in the economics, trade and industry department, said that the protocol covers only 27% of global emissions, a portion that will decline in future years. Any replacement would have to include all the major emitters.

The head of the UN climate change secretariat, Christiana Figueres, dealt with rumors of a secret text emanating from Mexico and an exclusive group of countries. She named Canada and Russia as resisting making new commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Australia was also reported to be opposed. For its stand on Kyoto, Canada was voted “fossil of the day” by 500 environmental groups on December 4.

Speaking of wind power, see this post in the Contra Costa Times:

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Altamont wind energy company to pay $2.5 million and replace turbines to reduce raptor deaths
By Denis Cuff, Contra Costa Times

The largest wind energy producer in the Altamont Pass area of eastern Alameda and Contra Costa counties has agreed to replace 2,400 wind turbines within four years and pay $2.5 million in a legal settlement to reduce deaths of eagles, hawks and other raptors hacked by turbine blades.

The settlement between NextEra Energy Resources, the state, and several environmental groups was announced Monday by the state Attorney General Jerry Brown.

One environmental leader praised the deal as a model for producing wind energy while minimizing the heavy toll the whirling turbine blades take on hundreds of raptors each year.

“We think that is a landmark agreement that balances the need for clean energy with protections for wildlife,” said Michael Lynes, conservation director for the Golden Gate Audubon Society. “This is an aggressive schedule for replacing turbines with new ones. It will go a long way toward reducing the kills in the Altamont area.”

The settlement resolves a debate about whether the company was making sufficient progress toward a previous legal pledge to reduce bird kills by 50 percent from 2007 to 2010.

“Rather than focus on the 50 percent debate, we agreed to get something in place that uses modern technology to increase protections for the birds,” Lynes said. “This does not resolve all the problems with avian mortalities, but it is a big step forward toward reducing them.”

New wind turbines are much larger and produce much more energy than old ones, reducing the number of blades that birds can fly into.

Under the deal, NextEra agreed to replace 2,400 of its turbines within four years. If it falls behind schedule, the company also pledges to shut down all its existing turbines no later than 2015.

The company also pledged to put the new turbines in environmentally friendly locations. Many turbines installed in the Altamont Pass in the 1970s and 1980s were placed in swales between ridges where golden eagles like to soar while looking for prey, biologists say.

The wind company said it would contribute $1.25 million to the California Energy Commission for research on reducing bird kills at Altamont Pass.

The wind company will give another $1.25 million to the East Bay Regional Park District and the Livermore Area Recreation and Park to improve and protect raptor habitat.

According to an 2004 state study, wind turbines at Altamont Pass kill an estimated 1,766 to 4,271 birds annually, including 880 to 1,330 raptors such as golden eagles, hawks, falcons and owls. The Altamont Pass is a prime breeding and migratory area for raptors.

Read more here. 

Threshold Sea Surface Temperature for Hurricanes and Tropical Thunderstorms Is Rising

Science Daily (Dec. 6, 2010)

Scientists have long known that atmospheric convection in the form of hurricanes and tropical ocean thunderstorms tends to occur when sea surface temperature rises above a threshold. The critical question is, how do rising ocean temperatures with global warming affect this threshold? If the threshold does not rise, it could mean more frequent hurricanes.

According to a new study by researchers at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), this threshold sea surface temperature for convection is rising under global warming at the same rate as that of the tropical oceans.

Their paper appears in the journal Nature Geoscience.

In order to detect the annual changes in the threshold sea surface temperature, Nat Johnson, a postdoctoral fellow at IPRC, and Shang-Ping Xie, a professor of meteorology at IPRC and UHM, analyzed satellite estimates of tropical ocean rainfall spanning 30 years. They find that changes in the threshold temperature for convection closely follow the changes in average tropical sea surface temperature, which have both been rising approximately 0.1C per decade.

Enlarged here.”The correspondence between the two time series is rather remarkable,” says lead author Johnson. “The convective threshold and average sea surface temperatures are so closely linked because of their relation with temperatures in the atmosphere extending several miles above the surface.”

The change in tropical upper atmospheric temperatures has been a controversial topic in recent years because of discrepancies between reported temperature trends from instruments and the expected trends under global warming according to global climate models. The measurements from instruments have shown less warming than expected in the upper atmosphere. The findings of Johnson and Xie, however, provide strong support that the tropical atmosphere is warming at a rate that is consistent with climate model simulations.

“This study is an exciting example of how applying our knowledge of physical processes in the tropical atmosphere can give us important information when direct measurements may have failed us,” Johnson notes.

The study notes further that global climate models project that the sea surface temperature threshold for convection will continue to rise in tandem with the tropical average sea surface temperature. If true, hurricanes and other forms of tropical convection will require warmer ocean surfaces for initiation over the next century.

This work was supported by grants from NOAA, NSF, NASA, and JAMSTEC. Read more here.

Icecap Note: This makes physical sense as the atmosphere warmed, the stability decreases unless the surface warms proportionally (note the big spike in the warm El Nino year of 1998). When cooling comes to the atmosphere in this new era of La Nina favored PDO and in a few years AMO, the curve will begin sloping down. It should be also noted that global tropical temperatures have returned below the 1979-1998 mean now in this La Nina according to the NASA satellites.

Britain is Freezing to Death; Mounting Death Toll in Europe; NYT Changes Headlines to “Extremes”

Tracey Boles and Lucy Johnston

MIDDLE class families are among millions of Britons who cannot afford to heat their homes this winter, as elderly ride on buses all day to stay in the warm.

After a week of snow and freezing temperatures a shocking picture has emerged of the bleak months ahead for 5.5 million households.

Pensioners, who are among those most vulnerable to the cold, are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep warm. Many have been using their free travel ­passes to spend the day riding on buses while others are seeking refuge from the cold in libraries and shopping centres.

Dot Gibson, spokeswoman for pressure group the National Pensioners’ Convention, said: “Now that we have one of the coldest winters, older people are going to have to make the unenviable decision whether or not to put the heating on. The Government should guarantee that they won’t cut the winter fuel allowance.”

The death toll from the big freeze rose to seven yesterday. They included two men who were killed in a crash on the M62 in Humberside and two teenage girls who died when their car collided with a Royal Mail van in Cumbria.

The winter death toll is set to rise steeply as official figures show that nine elderly people died every hour because of cold-related illnesses last year. The number of deaths linked to cold over the four months of last -winter reached nearly 28,000.

Charities claim this country has the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse than colder nations such as Finland and Sweden. About half of the people forced to spend over 10 per cent of their income on energy bills - the official definition of fuel poverty -are aged over 60. 

But working families also face a tough time meeting the cost of keeping the central heating turned on as fuel prices continue to rise. Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at price ­comparison service uswitch.com, said: “Middle-class households are now in fuel poverty.”

National Energy Action estimates that 5.5 million households will have plunged into fuel poverty by early next year due to price rises. This is up 400,000 on the group’s last estimate and represents 21 per cent of the UK’s 26 million households.

The last official figures, for 2008, showed there were 4.5 million fuel-poor households in the UK. On Friday, British Gas will raise prices for eight million customers. Millions more customers of Scottish & Southern Energy and ­ScottishPower have already been hit by price rises.

Last winter 70 per cent of household were forced to cut down or ration their energy use because of cost.

Uswitch’s Ms Robinson, who advised Tony Blair’s government on energy policy, warned: “Winter price hikes will simply force even more people down this route.”

Energy minister Greg Barker admitted last week that the system to deal with fuel poverty was “completely broken” and said he was “very worried” by the NEA figures.

Charity Age UK estimates that nearly a third of pensioners have resorted to extreme measures to keep warm. The National Pensioners’ Convention has described the situation as “Dickensian”. (Icecap Note: the age of Dickens was during the Dalton Minimum, with very similar solar conditions to the last several years. Many solar scientists now believe we have entered another Dalton like minimum or worse.)

Widow Rita Young, from Thorny, near Peterborough was struggling to stay warm last week. Mrs Young, 75, said: “I’ve worked all my life. It doesn’t feel fair. People my age don’t want to put hats and scarves on in their homes, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I sit in a blanket put on a hat and sometimes go to bed at 7.30 in the evening.”

Last week Lillian Jenkinson, 80, and William Wilson, 84, were found dead in the gardens of their homes 70 miles apart in Cumbria. Both are thought to have lain undetected in sub-zero temperatures for hours.

On Thursday a driver who stopped to help a stranded motorist in the Yorkshire Dales was killed when he was struck by another vehicle. Read more here. See this WSJ story on the mounting cold death toll in Europe. The New York Times changed the headlines after a few hours to one more suitable for the alarmist theme that extremes are occuring “Europe Jolted by Extremes of Weather” here.

This makes the likes of Blair, Brown, Holdren, Pachauri and his UN pirates, the enviros, the opportunists in the corporations and empty headed Hollywood ‘stars’ and Washington DC elitist politicans, and all the other wacky warmers and their enablers and cheerleaders in the lamestream media and alarmist blogs mass murderers. You see the world is awash in energy sources but the enviros and politicans are blocking access and want to push the useless alternative energy schemes which forces up the cost of energy which in the recession with high joblessness increases the number of families in energy poverty.

What happened to the ‘warmest year on record’: The truth is global warming has halted

By David Rose, Mail Online

A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, ‘is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record’ - a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 1961-1990 average.

World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an everrising trend: ‘Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far - 1998.’

Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits - an ambition that was not to be met.

Winter’s icy grip: Drivers and pedestrians battle through blizzards in Kent last week

Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind 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.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

This isn’t meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.

According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.

Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give 20 billion pounds immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.

The maths isn’t complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century’s end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn’t.

Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a ‘blip’ year when temperatures spiked because of a strong ‘El Nino’ effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office’s and CRU’s own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system’s acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.

When the Met Office issued its December 2009 preThere-diction, it was clearly expecting an even bigger El Nino spike than happened in 1998 - one so big that it would have dragged up the decade’s average.

But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown. Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.

That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office’s own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.

Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Nino was at its peak.

The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005.

There is no dispute that the world got a little warmer over some of the 20th Century. (Between 1940 and the early Seventies, temperatures actually fell.)

But little by little, the supposedly settled scientific ‘ consensus’ that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.

Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous ‘hockey stick graph’ showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ‘ medieval warm period’ around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.

Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th Century warming.

Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year’s ‘Climategate’ leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been ‘no statistically significant warming’ since 1995.

One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC’s lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports.

He wrote: ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.’

After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2, and that the ‘travesty’ was not the ‘pause’ but science’s failure to explain it.

The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse? Read more here.

Blam! Kapow! Climate Scientists in Verbal Brawl

By Blake Snow

Blam! Kapow! Smack! The bell has rung for the latest round of climate talks, but the battle continues among climate scientists too, making only one thing truly clear—the science of global warming simply isn’t settled.

Climate science suffered a black eye over the past 12 months, following revelations that the latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained numerous errors and relied too heavily on questionable sources. At the latest climate conference in Cancun, the group will stress that its research must continue.

But while governments try to push through an accord, the fighting over the science—and the IPCC’s role—continues unabated. And the body blows seem as violent as ever.

“The corruption within the IPCC revealed by the Climategate scandal, the doctoring of data and the refusal to admit mistakes have so severely tainted the IPCC that it is no longer a credible agency,” Don Easterbrook, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, declared in an interview with FoxNews.com. “Thus, it is no longer in a position to claim to speak for climate scientists.”

Ouch. Former weather forecaster and climate-change blogger Anthony Watts isn’t as outspoken as Easterbrook, but he agrees that the IPCC is failing. “Recent sloppy work such as the ‘Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035’ blunder, the questionable use of scientific citations in the last IPCC report, and the suspect business dealings of IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri have pretty much taken what most saw as a grade A scientific paper when first published and reduced it to a D minus today,” Watts told FoxNews.com.

Even those who believe man’s actions are raising the planet’s temperature admit that the U.N.’s climate group has struggled. “It’s been a tough year for the IPCC,” Aaron Huertas, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told FoxNews.com.

He believes the organization is learning from its mistakes, as well as the suggestions of the group that publicly detailed its flaws just a few month ago. “To its credit, the IPCC is taking recommendations from the InterAcademy Council to heart, and I think their future reports will be better for it,” he said.

And Huertas defended the group and its work with language just as loudly as the climate skeptics criticized it.

“Groups that oppose action on climate change spend a lot of time attacking the IPCC. But they never attack the National Academy of Sciences, even though they are making the same basic points.”

Easterbrook argues that in the case of climate change, the scientific method has been compromised by the sheer size of the government grant money involved. That and the research he feels is one-sided, of course. Blam!

“Climate research has now been so thoroughly contaminated by politics and power/money brokers that it has lost credibility,” Easterbrook wrote in an e-mail to FoxNews.com. “The only way to regain lost scientific credibility is by allowing scientific debate (which has been totally stifled by CO2 proponents), showing the public the scientific evidence for claimed conclusions, and opening up funding for other than CO2 proponents.”

“In other words, include the so-called skeptics in debates and agencies dealing with climate instead of ostracizing them,” Easterbrook said.

Watts agreed. “We’ve witnessed science make a sea change from intellectual curiosity to a role of active and impassioned advocacy,” he told FoxNews.com. “The only way to return to the scientific method is to remove the huge amounts of funding associated with climate change, and to hire people to do studies that have no financial incentive to maintain further research. The current process is like a welfare system for on-board scientist.”

Nevertheless, Huertas said the science is sound ... depending on whom you listen to, of course.

“I follow the skeptical blogs, and most of what’s on there I wouldn’t even call science,” he said. “A lot of it is just politics. At the end of the day, I ask people: ‘Who do you trust? A pundit on the radio talking about climate science or the scientists at NASA?’”

“I’m going with the scientists at NASA,” Huertas said.

Kapow!

Neither the IPCC nor the U.N. returned FoxNews.com’s requests for comment.

Read more here.

James Delingpole: The Met Office: lousier than a dead octopus: Updated with comments by Piers Corbyn

Climate Realists

s

“Why did we slide into chaos?” asks the front page of today’s Telegraph. It was prompted by the wrath of Transport Secretary Philip Hammond who apparently can’t understand why it is that Britain has been caught out - yet again - by snowy weather.

“There are lessons to be learnt from our performance in every bout of bad weather and it is important that we learn those now,” he says.

All right, Phil. Your wish is my command. For considerably less than you paid the RAC’s David Quarmby last month for a review of weather-related transport policy, I can tell you what the problem is: “The Met Office”.

As the good Dr North reminds us, as recently as late October the Met Office was predicting that we should expect an “unusually dry and mild winter”. This was news to every independent weather forecaster in the world from Joe Bastardi to Piers Corbyn who have been predicting a harsh winter for months.

But the Met Office of course knew better thanks to its spiffy new 33 million pound IBM supercomputer (90 per cent funded, of course, by the taxpayer) whose precognitive powers are so great, it is said that on a good day with a fair wind behind it and can very nearly match the track record of the dead celebrity Paul the Octopus. And of course, it’s this very same computer which is responsible for so many of the “projections” - not even “predictions”, note, but “projections” - of Anthropogenic Climate Doom so lovingly detailed on its taxpayer-funded website.

Why then, does the government go on relying on the services of this risible outfit? How come when the Met Office’s spokeswoman Vicky Pope pops up yet again to reassure us that this Siberian winter is a case of “weather not climate” does anyone still take her seriously?

Really, this is one for the psychiatrists, rather than me, but in it a nutshell it’s a case of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is when all the evidence of your senses and intellect tell you one thing; but your brain stubbornly insists the truth is otherwise.

So, for example, it’s snowing heavily outside; the country is in chaos; independent weather forecasters are predicting dreadful winters for many years to come; global warming stopped in 1998 even as CO2 emissions continued to rise; the Climategate emails reveal the scientists at the very heart of the IPCC to be corrupt and mendacious; wind farms and solar farms are an excedingly inefficient way of producing energy and have wreaked serious economic damage on all countries (Denmark, Spain, Germany) that have tried introducing them on a massive scale.

Yet still you go on insisting that: the snow is a temporary blip ("weather not climate"), AGW remains a serious threat - as the majority of the most distinguished and reliable scientific “experts” testify; green jobs are the future and the drive for renewables can only do Britain the power of good.

Well, cognitive dissonance is the polite way of putting it. I’d call it sheer and utter bloody madness.

So does Joe Bastardi:

“The shiver that is hitting is similar to the opening of January last year world wide, where major cold shots engulfed the far east, the eastern US and Europe. That these are growing more pronounced is no accident, and the climate people arguing for reduction of greenhouse gasses are acting like spoiled children when they claim what ever happens means they are right. I wish I had their job. When I am wrong, in what I do in the private sector, the ramifications are people will cancel their contract if they feel I am wrong enough of the time to lose them money… By the way, its what I love about competition and capitalism..it forces those that wish to excel to compete.. Imagine if your favorite football team was forced to “redistribute goals” based on some fictional rule that said that it wasn’t fair to score more than the other team.

I bet you wouldn’t be watching much football, eh?

Moral is that these wild cold shots mean at the least, the earth is fighting back from the warming, which is intuitive given the actual total history of the globe. What is amazing is the arrogance, and sheer elitism of a crew that will claim such events as theirs, when they have cost the world an untold amount shoving and unproven agenda down peoples throats. While I have always believed he was good intentioned (unlike many of my other companions in this debate) at the very least Al Gores stand on ethanol, sacrificing food for a fuel that not only can still be attained through fossil sources, but is polluting the northern gulf o Mexico to a point where its becoming dead (fertilizer coming downstream) and then his complete capitulation on the hurricane issue (remember, global warming causes more hurricanes) should at least give pause. But instead, like any good ideologue, its simply ignore the facts and then claim the opposite affect as the sign you are right.

I get nuts about this stuff.”

Don’t worry, Joe, you’re not the only one.

See more here.

U.S. Republicans Axe Global Warming Panel

By Benny Peiser, CCNet Extra - 1 December 2010

U.S. Republicans Axe Global Warming Panel

Politico, 1 December 2010

House Republicans will scrap the committee set up by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate global warming, the panel’s top Republican announced Wednesday.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) made official what many had already expected - the GOP majority will axe the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which Pelosi created in 2007.

“This hearing will be the last of the select committee,” Sensenbrenner announced.

Committee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called Wednesday’s hearing to give witnesses a chance to warn of the perils of climate change before the GOP launches efforts next year to roll back the Obama administration’s climate policies.

Sensenbrenner, a vocal climate change skeptic, had pushed to keep the panel alive to probe the White House’s energy policies. But it was seen as unlikely that GOP leadership would devote resources to the panel created by Democrats at the same time that they called for scaling back government spending.

The Wisconsin Republican may still play a key role in leading investigations into climate science next year. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who’s vying for the chairmanship of the Science Committee, told POLITICO Tuesday he’d like to see Sensenbrenner lead the panel’s climate science probes.

Markey, meanwhile, assured Republicans that he and others will battle from the minority to slash global warming emissions.

“We are not going away because the problems that climate change presents are too dangerous too urgent for us to disappear into the abyss of cynicism and loss,” Markey said. “We are not going away because China, India, and Germany are not going away as competitors for global energy dominance. We are not going away because the national security threats from our continued dependence on foreign oil are not going away.”

For the Chop: Republicans Put Global Warming Panel Out Of Business

The Wall Street Journal, 1 December 2010

Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey will hold one last media spectacle at his Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming today, allowing such oracles as green activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to preach about the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Let’s hope Speaker-designate John Boehner makes it the committee’s last hurrah.

Current Speaker Nancy Pelosi created this outfit in 2007 as a way to outflank then Energy Committee Chairman John Dingell, for whom climate change is not a religion. The committee provided Mr. Markey a prominent perch from which to work closely with California’s Henry Waxman (who later deposed Mr. Dingell) on the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and helped so many Democrats lose their seats in November.

Mr. Markey held more than 50 hearings, at which he demeaned reputable scientists, attacked oil and gas companies, and in general evangelized about the need to replace carbon energy with windmills and solar panels. With no bill-writing powers, committee Members spent $8 million or so on hearings, global “fact-finding” missions and reports of little consequence. Oh, and Mr. Markey elbowed his way into investigating the BP spill, which he used as a platform to demonize oil exploration.

Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner, who voted against establishing the panel, is now pushing to keep it alive - perhaps because he’s in line to run it. Mr. Sensenbrenner wants the committee to investigate the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon regulations, but Republicans have plenty of committees to do that. A Republican House that claims to favor limited government ought to be able to kill a committee that exists only to provide a forum for a job-killing climate agenda.

Icecap Note: The very same RFK jr. who two years ago had said it was sad the children of the DC area would never get again to see snow and sleds due to global warming. Last winter the Capitol and surroundings experiences “Snowmaggeden” with all-time seasonal snow records shattered and sleds and skis were the only ways to get around at times. He is just the kind of ‘expert’ the clueless, arrogant Markey would call on.

See this Farewell to Markey’s Comedy Central Committee by Climatequotes.com (H/T Marc Morano). In it the author concludes “I propose a toast - to the short lived Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming - may we always remember you as a hyper-partisan pseudo-scientific political sham.” Amen.

Nightmare travel as another major snow clobbers UK

UK Daily Mail

Britain’s workforce was tonight embroiled in a second night of snow chaos with forecasters warning there is worse to come. Police in several counties have been urging people to leave work early - with up to eight more inches of snow predicted in London and the South East tonight. Eurostar said that half of its services would be cancelled today. It advised passengers to only make essential journeys.

Crawling along: Motorists edge their way forward in the centre of York today

Anyone who doesn’t have to travel is being warned to stay at home as temperatures plummet to -6c. Surrey Superintendent Chris Moon said: ‘I have put out several severe weather warnings in my career, but this one I really must stress.’ Large swathes of the country ground to a halt this afternoon - with many roads, rail lines and airports forced to close.

Scores of passengers were forced to sleep in broken-down trains overnight after two trains became stuck in the snow, while passengers stranded at Gatwick faced the prospect of bedding down for another night in the terminal. The airport shut down with hundreds of flights cancelled after two runways became inoperable. An airport spokesman said: ‘We brought in extra people to try to clear the runway. We had a vast army of people, but as fast as they were clearing the snow, the quicker it settled again.’ The facility will remain shut until at least 6am at the ‘very, very earliest’. And passengers at Edinburgh Airport were also left stranded after it shut early because of the harsh weather.  Scotland has recorded its worst November snowfall for 40 years, with temperatures expected to fall to -25C overnight.

Rail services around the country are also expected to be disrupted through the night and tomorrow, with special timetables running in worst-hit areas. A spokesman for Network Rail said that the south and east were expected to be hardest hit by the weather overnight. ‘We are expecting particularly heavy snow tonight in Kent and Sussex, and while there will be a contingency timetable in operation, people can expect delays and should check online if possible before they start their journey.’

Asked how operators are handling the hazard, the spokesman said: ‘I wouldn’t want to generalise about the country as a whole as there are some train operators that have run a near perfect service today - yet if you move further south you’ll find 2ft of snow and disrupted services

Snow dog: A giant canine igloo made by Geoff Maloney and his children in the garden of their Teesville home

A blizzard in Manchester today makes driving conditions treacherous

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Sweden braces for record freeze

The Local Science and Technology News

Stockholm is forecast to experience its coldest seasonal temperatures for over 100 years this week as winter weather takes hold of the country, according to the Swedish Meteorological Institute (SMHI). Temperatures across the country are expected to drop to record lows for the first week of December, with the exception of the far north, with averages coming in 7-10 degrees Celsius below normal.

Stockholm registered -11 degrees Celsius at the weekend, the coldest November temperature since 1965 and the mercury is set to plunge further on Wednesday and Thursday, dropping as low as -15. Last week temperatures as low as -36 degrees Celsius have been recorded in Sweden as snowfalls and storm winds play havoc with transport services. This required the military to be called out to help.

“It is far below average temperatures, which usually oscillate around zero at this time of the year,” said Alexandra Ohlsson, a meteorologist with SMHI.

Dalarna and Jamtland in northern Sweden will also be hit with the harsh weather. The Storsjon lake in the heart of Jamtland’s main city Ostersund has already frozen over in most parts.

SMHI forecasted that in southern and central areas the cold will ease off somewhat come Friday. Northern Norrland will however drop to minus 14-17 degrees Celsius in the middle of the day.

The sub-zero temperatures are here to stay though, even in the south, Alexandra Ohlsson said. “It looks like the sub-zero temperatures will persist,” she said.

With more snow on the way in from the Baltic Sea, the current high snow depth of eight decimetres, recorded in Tidaholm in western Sweden, is set to be exceeded.

Habo and Mullsjo are some of the most wintry white municipalities in southern and central Sweden, and warnings have been issued over the dangers associated with heavy snowfalls. Emergency services in Jonkoping county in central Sweden are urging people to check their roofs, especially split-level houses where deep pockets of heavy snow can form.

SMHI was reluctant to issue a forecast for Christmas and on whether the temperatures will remain low enough to keep away the slush that typifies the festive season in many parts of southern and central Sweden.

Read more and see comments here. Two comments are copied.

12:13 November 30, 2010 by StockholmSam

Why tell Al Gore? He pointed it out rather clearly in his movie. One symptom of climate change resulting from global warming is that certain areas will experience much colder winters. The basic idea of climate change is that the earth’s ecology is a holistic system and each piece depends on the other pieces. When one piece gets out of whack, the other pieces adjust. These adjustments are expected to take the form of extreme heatwaves and droughts in some areas as well as extreme cold spells in other areas. Simple to understand, really.

17:24 November 30, 2010 by roaringchicken92
The global warming alarmists are also now telling us that air pollution in Asia, particularly in China, is the primary cause of the global cooling we’ve experienced over the last ten years. Scientists are trying to encourage operators of coal-fired generator plants to clean up their emissions so they can again set about reemphasizing that air pollution causes global warming.

Another group of these scientists has just returned from the arctic summer to tell us that polar ice is melting. They will now head to the antarctic summer to prove that the polar ice is melting there as well.

Guys and gals, if you tell me that “pollution is bad, we should do something about it” or “overfishing is dangerous and needs to be controlled”, I’m apt to believe you. Don’t feed me self-contradictory bullsh*t and expect me to believe it. 

Time For Economic Restoration Now That Climate Change Deception Exposed

By Dr. Tim Ball

Problems are only problems if you are unaware of them. Once identified you’re over halfway to resolution. American voters rejected the Obama administration’s policies of increasing government control through energy, environment and economic policies. They voted for cessation and reversal. Now the new politicians and chastened survivors must act accordingly. Debt and deficit are serious problems and the solution depends partly on reduced government spending, but mostly on a vigorous growing economy and that depends on energy. Maurice Strong’s plan to collapse the industrial economies recognized this with his focus on fossil fuels and CO2, so that’s where the solution must begin.

Keynote speaker Vaclav Klaus, elected President of the Czech Republic in 2003 made a memorable comment for me at the first Heartland Conference on Climate Change in New York. He said we’ve just emerged from 70 years of communism and asked, incredulously, why anyone would go back. He was referring to the US and Europe and identified environmentalism and climate change as the vehicles for the transit. He made his case effectively in his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles where he writes, “The themes in the contemporary dispute (or perhaps clash) are clearly about human freedom - not about the environment.” His warnings are not surprising given his personal experiences, but they’re supported by similar comments and actions by Russia and China. The contradiction is not surprising and parallels evolution of human, social, economic and political systems.

Evolution

We’ve really only tried two socio-economic systems, capitalism and communism. They evolved from two major 19th century works published just 8 years apart. Darwin’s Origin of The Species published in 1859 is the essence of capitalism with its theme of survival of the fittest. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital published in 1867 denounced capitalism and became the basis of communism. Now capitalist countries move toward communism in the form of total government control.

Some foolishly suggest a compromise is the oxymoron of State Capitalism. Trouble is capitalism requires free markets with little or no government interference. Ironically, one of the few places where free markets succeeded was the black market in the Soviet Union. One development that paralleled growth of capitalism was increasing government intervention in the market place. Malfeasance in the market place made people realize unbridled capitalism was not the answer. The problem is, once you start controls, how are they limited? This is where limits to growth really apply.

Maurice Strong engineered the attack on capitalism and industrialism, its engine of growth, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He focused on energy, particularly fossil fuels, and that marks the biggest difference currently between former capitalist and communist countries. Phony environmentalists with political agendas and those milking government for climate research funding, blame skeptics for the failures of climate conferences and the collapse of global climate policies. In fact, it was India and China who consistently blocked the plans as they moved to expand their economies. Russia sits cynically on the side doing only what benefits them. All three continue with extensive development of fossil fuels by ensuring access to supply and building energy facilities, especially coal and nuclear. Energy from these facilities is used to produce alternate energy products for nations who foolishly pursue an already proven unsustainable green agenda.

India, China and Russia did not reject IPCC findings simply to advance their economies. They did it because they knew the science was false. Consider the presentations made by Putin’s economic advisor Andrei Ilarianov clearly with approval.

Putin only changed when they threatened to deny access to the World Trade Organization (WTO) if he didn’t sign Kyoto.

Ilarianov resigned. All three paid lip service to Kyoto, but did not become enslaved to the carbon footprint that is stomping out economies of the so-called capitalist economies.

What To Do? Some Simple Inexpensive Solutions

There are simple steps essential to the US rebuilding energy sources and resources.

(1) Put Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma in charge of a Commission to get climate and energy policies back from the edge of disaster. He is the only politician who understood the climate corruption and spoke out about it despite ridicule and nasty attacks.

(2) Immediately cancel all plans for Cap and Trade or similar strategies.

(3) Withdraw from the IPCC and cancel all research on climate carried out by government agencies. Reassign employees to extensive and better data collection on a multitude of environmental factors. This must include accurate information on all energy resources to avoid the exploitation of the argument we are exhausting resources, a fundamental tenet of the Club of Rome. 

(4) Produce reliable, fully documented, material that explains why CO2, especially human production, is not the cause of global warming or climate change.

(5) Launch a vigorous campaign to educate people about the science in ways they can understand.

(6) Cancel all climate research funding and redirect it to identifying real problems with workable solutions. Academics have shown they’ll sell integrity for funding so have them produce really relevant rather than contrived work.

(7) Produce reliable, fully documented, material that explains how the climate issue was manipulated. This must include the motive and the mechanism.

(8) Cancel all subsidies to alternate energies. There are some uses for alternate energies, but they are very limited and very expensive, a problem completely masked by the subsidies.

(9) Review and reduce all unnecessary restrictions on expansion of oil, coal and gas reserves established to reduce CO2.

(10) Review and reduce all unnecessary restrictions on nuclear power development established after environmentalists, following Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, exploited public fears. It is no longer necessary with new technologies.

(11) Reverse the Supreme Court decision that CO2 is a toxic substance. It was based on the falsified work of the IPCC. This will remove control of CO2 from the EPA.

(12) Remove all energy subsidies and allow market forces to determine development. This will likely result, in nuclear and coal producing electricity; natural gas powering vehicles; and oil sustaining petrochemical industries.

(13) Cancel legislation and funding introduced to deal with CO2, carbon footprints or any other extension of the idea.

(14) Reduce taxes on all fuels as a direct benefit to the entire society. They’ve become a “sin” tax to punish us for causing climate change.

(15) Review all environmental policies evolved from the false climate science.

Government can offer significant prizes for private citizens, the source of American exceptionalism, to influence innovation that solves basic energy problems. These include efficient large-scale storage of electricity and superconductivity.

Rejection of the Obama agenda includes exploitation of climate as a vehicle for total government control. The White House appointment of John Holdren, member of the Club of Rome, as Science Czar confirmed the commitment. It’s time for the newly elected politicians to team up with Senator Inhofe and roll back the policies. Beyond the increased debt, the climate basis for the energy policy has done much to destroy the economy and will do more unless quickly reversed. It then becomes the solution rather than the problem.

See post in the Canada Free Press here.

The Crown Jewel of Global Warming is a Fake

By Art Horn, Meteorologist

For two decades now we have been told over and over again that global warming is melting the world glaciers and this will flood coastal cities and farmland and in fact it’s happening now! The historic and unprecedented flooding will displace millions if not billions of people and wreak havoc with the global economy, not to mention nature. This apocalyptic proclamation, the crown jewel of global warming alarmists has been the primary rallying cry in the effort to “stop global warming” by shutting down the carbon based energy producing companies of the world. This is the ultimate goal of the hundreds of environmental groups across the globe. The big problem with all of this is that the dazzling jewel of disaster has been proven to be a fake. A couple of satellites turned it over and found a big crack.

In its latest 2007 climate assessment report number 4 the IPCC states that sea level increased at a rate of about 13.5 inches during the 20th century. This number is considerably higher than the 6.7 inch per century rate derived from tidal gauges around the world. David Burton found the rate of rise from tide gauges to be only 2.4 inches per century. Data from the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite mission launched in 1992 indicated a 12.2 inch per century rate based on data from 1993 to 2005. 

In its latest report the IPCC has predicted sea level will rise as little as 7 inches to as much as 118 inches (ten feet) by the year 2100. Some are predicting much greater rises. Recently Fen Montaigne a senior editor at Yale Environment 360 wrote that if the west Antarctic ice sheet melts sea level will rise 16 to 20 feet. Al Gore is predicting a 20 foot sea level rise by 2100. Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is predicting the possibility of an 82 foot rise by 2100. These frightening predictions are the crown jewel of the global warming establishment.

The degree of sea level rise from these predictions ranges from no change from the current rate, about 7 inches per century to somewhere around 20 feet of rise by 2100. The alarmists are quick to point out that things could get much worse if the IPCC’s worst case scenarios come true. Currently ocean expansion is the primary cause of sea level rise. This expansion is a response to the small amount of warming that has taken place in the last 150 years, about 1 degree Fahrenheit. The alarmist community feels confident that predictions of the climate, of which much is still not understood, will be accurate 100 years into the future. Based on these “accurate predictions” sea level could rise dramatically based on the current rate of rise and forecast increases.

There is a problem with all these predictions. It’s the data released from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) tandem satellite system. The analysis has revealed a large and obvious crack in the supposedly impenetrable crown jewel of global warming. The data reveal that global sea level is rising at a rate of .04 inches per year. This equates to 4.0 inches per century. This rate is far lower than the IPCC’s rate of 13.5 inches per century and well below the TOPEX/Poseidon rate of 12.2 inches per century. What this means is that real world data is showing that the threat of long term massive sea level rise is a no show. The satellite data says there has been no acceleration of sea level rise and in fact the rate of rise is three times lower than the most recent IPCC assessment.

Despite all the TV news stories, documentaries, newspaper headlines, magazine articles, pleas from environmental groups, highway billboards, university studies and international climate change conference reports there is no sign of rapid sea level rise, none. It’s all a prediction of what might happen, not of what is happening. Television networks need ratings, newspapers and magazines need readers, universities, environmental groups and climate conferences need funding. Scary stories of coastal cities gulping for air as the oceans wash over them creates a morbid sense of fascination that attracts both audiences and money.

The alarmist climate change industry will combat this data and its results. The results will be attacked, revised and contorted to keep the threat alive and the money flowing. Most of the time the attackers use the assumption that the future predictions of global temperature rise are correct. There is no evidence that this is even remotely true. The real inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperature has been falling for 3,000 years as revealed by the Greenland ice core data (below). Current temperature changes are but tiny blips in the overall cooling. The temperature has dropped some 3.75 degrees Fahrenheit since the Minoan Warm Period some 3,300 years ago. The ultimate irony will be that if the long term trend continues shivering future generations may look back and wonder why we saw warming when the next ice age was staring us in the face.

The global warming monster that feeds on the dying carcass of man made global warming will continue to scare people as long as it can. It will continue to devour billions of dollars until it ultimately chokes of its own gluttony. Unfortunately many innocent people may be hurt before the beast is dead. The threat of massive sea level rise has been the primary weapon of fear for those looking to control how we make energy and who rules the world.  For those who can see clearly the crown jewel is in full sight and the evidence says it’s a fake.  PDF

See also this excellent post by Anthony Watts on Watts Up With That “Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history”.

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