A blockbuster summer followed by the highest number of winter visitors since 9/11 have combined to give Whistler its best year on record, Tourism Whistler announced Thursday. Mother Nature helped by delivering a record-breaking snowfall last November which continued to accumulate to more than 14 metres (46 feet) over the winter—more than 40 per cent above the average.

American skiers and snowboarders responded by increasing visits and Europeans joined the party when they realized snow was scarce at home, said Arlene Schieven, marketing vice-president with Tourism Whistler. See full story here.

As we noted in the blog story Northwest Snow Drought Caused by Natural Factors and For That matter May be Over this is no surprise and may be signs of what’s to come.  One more note, with the shift north of the storm track this year, it was not surprising southern California had a dry season. In fact, as of June 1, Los Angeles was heading towards the driest “wet season - July 1-June 30”, on record. See NWS LA Drought Summary.

“The open admission by a climate scientist of the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), Dr Jim Renwick, that his organization achieves only 50 per cent accuracy in its climate forecasts, and that this is as good as any other forecaster around the world, should be a wake-up call for world political leaders,” said Rear Admiral Jack Welch, chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. Yesterday the coalition published an analysis of seasonal climate predictions by NIWA over the past five years which found that the overall accuracy of the predictions was just 48 per cent.

Defending the NIWA record, Dr Renwick said his organisation was doing as well as any other weather forecaster around the world. He was quoted by the country’s leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald as saying: “Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well.” Later on New Zealand radio, Dr Renwick said: “The weather is not predictable beyond a week or two.”

Admiral Welch said that these statements warrant immediate attention by governments around the world. “Dr Renwick is no lightweight. He was a lead author on Working Group I of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and serves on the World Meteorological Organisation Commission for Climatology. See full story here.

As many of you know from watching blog postings here, I have made it my mission to photograph, survey, and catalog every USHCN station for the purposes of doing a qualitative analysis on the near surface temperature data produced by the USHCN dataset. To that end, I have created http://www.surfacestations.org which links to a separate photographic database server that I have set up. It was designed from the start to be collaborative.

Therefore I’m writing today to ask your assistance in this project. What are the goals?
1. To provide a standardized method for site survey and reporting so that interested individuals can gather site survey data, pictures, and anecdotal history of climate recording sites worldwide, and upload to a publicly searchable photographic database, (2) To provide a repository for screened and approved qualitative and quantitative site survey data, pictures, and anecdotal history, (3) To provide a publicly searchable database of such information for USHCN and GHCN climate station sites, (4) To photographically document sites that have been well preserved and maintained through their history and (5) To photographically demonstrate examples of sites that may introduce biases and errors through faulty siting, encroachments, or maintenance issues, and to identify specific issues when possible.

To see what you can do to help with this critical process, see the weblog here.

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.” So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

My series set out to profile the dissenters—those who deny that the science is settled on climate change—and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world’s premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop—the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists—the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects—and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction.

Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position. See full story here.

Reference: Gerten, D., Schaphoff, S. and Lucht, W. 2007. Potential future changes in water limitations of the terrestrial biosphere. Climatic Change 80: 277-299.

Climate-alarmists typically predict increasing drought for many parts of the world as the air’s CO2 content continues to climb; and they claim that this phenomenon will have huge negative consequences for earth’s terrestrial plants. However, that seemingly simple conclusion ignores some important mitigating circumstances and feedback phenomena that suggest a significantly different outcome. After completing all of their analyses, Gerten et al.’s “main finding” was that “the final CO2 effect on LTA, an index that quantifies the degree to which transpiration and photosynthesis are co-limited by soil water shortage, is a positive one, which led them to further conclude that “LTA is a better proxy for limitation of plant growth and net primary production than soil moisture itself or precipitation.

Consequently, even in a world of declining soil moisture content - which is itself just the opposite of what is observed in the real world (see Soil (Water Status - Field Studies) in our Subject Index) - the physiological benefits provided by the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content tend to overpower whatever negative effects global warming might have on earth’s plant life; and this is one of the reasons why the Greening of the Earth continues unabated over the entire planet.  See full report here