Summer has arrived at Whistler Blackcomb, but the results of an amazing winter of snow (1382 cm’s of total snowfall) can still be experienced at the Summit of Whistler Mountain. With the Peak Chair now open daily for sightseeing as part of the Peak 2 Peak Alpine Experience, visitors can gain access into the alpine and walk from the Summit of Whistler down to the Roundhouse lodge through snow walled lined trails, with banks as high as ten metres tall, as seen in the photoes below (taken near the peak July 5, 2012).

Visitors can also experience the record breaking Peak 2 Peak gondola, and the stunning 360 degree views that it provides.

High resolution copies of this image and additional images can be downloaded at the following link.

All photos courtesy of Mitch Winton/Coast Mountain Photo

Unless you live in Seattle, you likely did not know that the National Weather Service just announced that the city endured its third coolest June on record. As much of America swelters through a heat wave, it’s not surprising that the usual suspects are telling everyone that it’s because of “global warming.”

I have a longtime friend, Ron Marr who has a Jack Russell Terrier and in a recent commentary for Missouri Life magazine, he wrote that, “Jack doesn’t believe in global warming in the least; he does not believe the recent atmospheric hellfire results from ozone holes or aerosol cans or giant leprechauns with a big magnifying glass. We share the same views on the topic and have discussed them often. Our considered opinion is that this streak of blazing nonsense stems from the fact that - to put it in scientific terms - it’s summer and the sun is hot.”

On July 3rd Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, a newswire service that has been reporting global warming lies for decades, wrote that “If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.”

IT’S SUMMERTIME, SETH! IT GETS HOT IN THE SUMMER!

It did not take long for the high priests of global warming to proclaim the current WEATHER to be CLIMATE. There’s a very big difference. Weather is what is occurring now while climate is measured in terms of centuries. It’s about trends and cycles.

It surely has been a hot summer thus far. Reuters reported that “more than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States.” The announcement was made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on July 2nd.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi took another reporter to task for coupling the heat wave with global warming, pointing out that “The US is less than 10% of the globe” while ignoring that “Scandinavia had coldest June on record and that Australia is having a bad winter.”

What we should all know by now is that the Warmists all use trickery to advance their hoax.

The simple fact is that heat waves are nothing new. In 1936 a North American heat wave was the most severe in the modern history of the continent. It occurred in the middle of the Great Depression, killing more than 5,000 Americans and desiccating vast amounts of crops. To put it in perspective, there were no home air conditioning appliances at the time. People depended on fans to circulate the air.

The sun surely is hot, but its heat - solar radiation - has not been sufficient to avoid cyclical ice ages and short term periods of intense cold because the sun itself goes through cycles of increasing and diminishing solar radiation.

There was a “Little Ice Age” that lasted between 1550 and 1850. Temperatures dropped to the point that the Thames River in England froze over and “frost fairs” were held on its surface. It was felt through Europe and parts of North America.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley noted that “Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods,” adding that “this warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end.”

The average length of interglacial periods is 11,500 years.

In the 1970s, prior to the global warming hoax, many scientists were convinced that a new ice age had begun. In January 2012, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Habibullo Abdusamatov, predicted that the next ice age will begin in 2014 and will last at least two centuries. Regarding the timing, he could be right. He could be wrong. One thing is sure. The Earth is overdue another ice age.

My friend, Robert W. Felix, the author of “Not by Fire, But by Ice”, is an expert on ice ages and magnetic reversals. It is the latter that accompanied mass extinctions such as the dinosaur’s fate and many other species at the end of the Cretaceous period. In ice ages, the Earth’s water doesn’t disappear, it turns to ice. The current growth of the planet’s glaciers is an indicator of what is actually occurring.

Another indicator, of course, is the sun. On January 29, 2012, writing in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, David Rose noted that “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the plane has not warmed for the past 15 years.”

“After emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters, and a shortening of the season available for growing food. Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.”

“We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’...but sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th century.” Oddly, despite the obvious and documented effect of the sun on the planet’s average temperature, there remain scientists who are unconvinced of its essential role. Only a relative few even understand the role of magnetic reversals on the planet’s history.

Actually, the diminishing number of sunspots has been known for a while. In June 2010, Stuart Clark, writing in The New Scientist, observed that “For the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”

The obvious often catches people by surprise. The last Ice Age came on very swiftly and the next is likely to do so as well. In the meantime, the current heat wave will capture everyone’s attention.

The recent thunderstorm wind event which caused widespread wind damage from Ohio to the mid-Atlantic coast has, rather predictably, led to claims that global warming is the root cause.

Known as a “derecho”, these events are indeed uncommon, but have always been around: the term was originally coined in 1888 in a study of thunderstorm wind damage which occurred in 1877.

In fact, one of the most famous events occurred when global temperatures reached a minimum, back in the 1970’s. Known simply as “The Storm”, it occurred 35 years ago today, on July 4, 1977. There were widespread blowdowns of trees (see the photo, above). Even though the event occurred over relatively unpopulated areas in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the highest recorded wind speed was an astonishing 115 mph, officially recorded with an airport anemometer.

Compare that to the derecho event of last week, which occurred over heavily populated areas: the highest measured wind speed in the extensive list of reports at the Storms Prediction Center was only 92 mph, and even that was on a home weather station, and so is unofficial.

So, why all the fuss over last weeks storm? Because it didn’t hit flyover country. Tens of millions of people were affected, and millions went without power.

Of course, those affected included many journalists, so it is only natural that they would speculate (and seek out experts to speculate) about the sinister causes of such an event.

Surely the silliest comment I saw came from Bill Nye, “The Science Guy”, who stated: “...We had a 30-degree temperature drop in Maryland and Virginia this weekend, in just - in a half-hour. These are consistent with climate models.”

First of all, such temperature drops occur routinely with the passage of mid-latitude thunderstorms. Secondly, climate models predict no such thing anyway. If “The Science Guy” gets it this wrong, how can I trust him on anything else?

Now that the mainstream media are hyperventilating over global warming being responsible for the heat wave, fires and thunderstorms hitting the US, it is a good time to check if they are applying the same science they used to explain winter cold snaps, like the one we saw just 2 years ago.

If they were serious, you’d at least think their science would remain consistent when explaining weather extremes. Anything else, after all, is just quackery.

Two years ago, the AP and scientists blamed the unusually cold winter weather on “natural variability”; they began:

Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida’s orange groves and beaches.

Whatever happened to global warming? experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all ‘It’s part of natural variability,’ said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, ‘we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.’

Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes...and even cold spells.”

The AP then quoted scientists to explain the cause of the cold snap of 2010, saying that it was just a “big outbreak of Arctic air over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere”, and then went on to provide the details about natural variability, which of course is reasonable.

But to explain the current 2012 heat wave near DC, they completely abandoned the reasonable science and went off and blamed CO2 witchcraft and Big Oil sorcerers summoning a heat wave.

So it’s up to us to use the rest of the AP’s 2010 story to explain the heat wave, changing only a few words:

“We basically have seen just a big outbreak of Arctic tropical air’ over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere, Arndt said. ‘The Arctic tropical air has really turned itself loose on us.’

In the atmosphere, large rivers of air travel roughly west to east around the globe between the Arctic and the tropics. This air flow acts like a fence to keep Arctic tropical air confined.

But recently, this air flow has become bent into a pronounced zigzag pattern, meandering north south and south north. If you live in a place where it brings air up down from the south north, you get warm cold weather. In fact, record highs lows were reported this week in Washington state and Alaska West Coast.

But in the eastern United States, like some other unlucky parts of the globe, Arctic tropical air is swooping down in from the north southwest. And that’s how you get a temperature of 3 104 degrees in Beijing Washington DC, a reading of minus-42 +104 in mainland Norway Norfolk, and 18 inches of snow rain in parts of Britain the South, where a member of Parliament Congress who said the snow heat ‘clearly indicates a cooling warming trend’ was jeered by colleagues.

The zigzag pattern arises naturally from time to time, but it is not clear why it’s so strong right now, said Michelle L’Heureux, a meteorologist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The center says the pattern should begin to weaken in a week or two.

Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground, a forecasting service, said he expects more typical winter summer weather across North America early next week.

That will be welcome news in the South, where farmers have been trying to salvage millions of dollars’ worth of strawberries and other crops.

Why Borenstein and the quack scientists he interviewed didn’t use the same 2010 cold-snap science to explain the general atmospheric dynamics behind the current heat is sort of a mystery. Now that we are dealing with heat, they are blaming it all on CO2 without even citing a single paper to back it up.

So what are we left with? We have to assume that it’s a few fringe charlatans trying to fan the flames of fear. It’s as sad an example of sham science as you’ll ever find.

For these catastrophe-mongers, warm weather in the winter means global warming, cold weather in the winter also means global warming, heat in the summer of course means global warming, and so does cold in the summer. It is nothing more than the irresponsible perpetuation of an increasingly obvious fraud.

Folks,

A simply astonishing attack on two recent critical US campus lectures on DAGW, published in EOS - the weekly news sheet of the American Geophysical Union, the largest professional geoscience organisation in the world; followed by Lord Monckton’s pithy reply.

Professor Robert (Bob) M. Carter

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Eos Forum, Vol. 93, No. 27, 3 July 2012

Effective Strategies to Counter Campus Presentations on Climate Denial

By Jeffrey D. Corbin, Department of Biological Sciences, Union College, Schenectady, N. Y.; E-mail: corbinj@union.edu; and Miriam E. Katz, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N. Y.

PAGES 252-253 2012. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.

Although 97%- 98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field accept the basic tenets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) findings [Anderegg et al., 2010], there is a consistent undercurrent of doubt among the general public (A. Leiserowitz et al., Global warming’s six Americas in May 2011, online report, 57 pp., Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 2011). To some extent, this doubt is fueled by high-profile climate change deniers who offer “the real view” of climate science

[Oreskes and Conway, 2010]. Our campuses recently hosted two such speakers: Ivar Giaever at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Christopher Monckton (also known as Lord Monckton) at Union College. (Monckton’s presentation can be seen at http:// union.campusreform.org/ group/ blog/ live -webinar-lord -monckton-at -union-college.)

While such speakers often intend to muddy the waters with respect to climate science [McCright and Dunlap, 2010], the effect at our campuses was to galvanize our students and colleagues to highlight the widely accepted facts of climate change and the nature of expert scientific consensus on this topic. This communication was achieved using social media and followup events that raised the profile of climate change discussions. These events proved to be so successful that we offer our experiences so that others can capitalize on similar visits by climate change deniers by converting them into “teachable moments.”

It is our intention neither to address the content of the lectures nor to expand on the extensive rebuttals to their arguments [e.g., Nordhaus , 2012] (see also http:// www .realclimate.org/ wiki/index.php?title=ChristopherMonckton and http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/ jpabraham/globalwarming/Monckton/Monckton%20Presentation%20June %2022/ index.htm).

Instead, we describe the successful use of multiple strategies to present an accurate picture of climate science. The attention and publicity surrounding the presentations by the climate change deniers almost certainly engaged both of our institutions in a discussion of climate science to a far greater extent than would have occurred if controversial speakers were not brought to campus. The announcement of each upcoming lecture was a cause for concern for us and our colleagues because - let us be clear - there is damage to be done by such (misre)presentations.

Educating the public so that people understand the science of climate change, including its causes and potential consequences, is a difficult task. By distorting the scientific process or attacking the legitimacy of scientists, such as those involved in the presentation of the United Nations’ IPCC reports, these speakers have a chance to undo much of the work we have done. It was neither practical nor desirable to block either speaker from making his presentation at our campuses.

Giaever, for example, is a member of the RPI faculty, and neither speaker received speaking fees from our institutions for his appearance. Furthermore, colleges and universities exist for the very purpose of exchanging ideas. Rather, the most effective way to counter such distorting presentations is to provide a more accurate picture of climate science and to point out flaws in the speakers’ analyses. We did this along with a diverse coalition of students and faculty from a variety of departments. Strategies included public displays with information and illustrations related to climate change science, the use of social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit to exchange information and ideas, and the organization of follow- up events that focused on the science of climate change.

The follow-up events, in particular, were essential to our efforts’ success. The RPI event, called “The Science of Climate Change,” took place approximately 2 weeks after the presentation by Giaever (http://approach.rpi .edu/ 2012/ 03/ 09/ the -big -picture-of -climate-change -science/). The format was close to that of a lecture, with an opportunity for members of the approximately 150- person audience to ask questions. The Union College follow-up event was mostly organized around questions from the more than 60 students who attended. Significantly, Monckton came to the Union College follow-up and sat in the first row. This forum allowed students to ask questions of various members of the Union College faculty and carry on a high- level discussion of climate change, the threats it poses, and possible solutions. They were also able to engage Monckton in extensive exchanges about his arguments.

The principal lesson from our experiences is that our students are some of the most effective counters to such presentations by climate change deniers. Largely on their own, students at each of our institutions organized sophisticated campaigns to present a coherent message about the science of climate change. They engaged with each speaker during the question- and-answer periods that followed the lectures, used social media to communicate with one another and with their peers, and organized alternative forums in which the science of climate change was effectively presented.

They displayed highly sophisticated critical thinking skills and the passion and energy to organize, to engage with the speakers, and to rebut arguments that misrepresented the state of climate science. On the other hand, faculty involvement in the presentation of climate science can be critical as well. It is likely too much to ask that students shoulder the entire burden of rebutting prominent speakers who have well practiced arguments. Even in the case of the student-organized question-and-answer forum at Union College, two members of the faculty, along with one student, moderated the discussion. Faculty members from several other departments were also in attendance to help answer questions.

The final challenge, and the one for which we were least prepared, was to deal with postevent publicity. While we had effectively used social media tools to organize and communicate within our own communities, the Union College event was subject to a well- organized campaign that used those same tools to discredit our efforts. (See comments at http:// www .concordy.com/ article/opinions/march -7 -2012/ a -lords -opinion-cant-compete-with -scientific-truth/4222/, http://wattsupwiththat.com/ 2012/ 03/ 10/ moncktons-schenectady-showdown/, and http:// opinion.financialpost.com/ 2012/ 04/ 20/aristotles-climate/.)

Such campaigns have been mounted against a variety of other communicators of climate science as well [e.g., Mann , 2012]; yet we would have been far better prepared for the postevent publicity if we had anticipated that Twitter and other Internet tools can effectively nationalize discussions that take place even at small colleges. The time and, more important, the expertise required to mount such an organized challenge can be daunting. The need for skills in social and media communications that typically fall outside scientists’ graduate training is well described [e.g., Bowman et al., 2010; Moser , 2010; Pidgeon and Fischhoff, 2011]. Yet, when we faculty engage climate science deniers, we make clear to our students and the entire community that we believe that much is at stake. If we yield the argument to speakers who attempt to discredit our research and contradict what we teach in our classes, then we risk giving the impression that scientific literacy and public awareness of climate science are of little importance to us.

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Right of reply

We are grateful to the editors of Eos for this right of reply to Corbin and Katz (Effective Strategies to Counter Campus Presentations on Climate Denial, Eos, 2012 July 3), a 1200-word melange or smørgasbord of the shop-worn logical fallacies of argument ad populum, ad verecundiam, and, above all, ad hominem.

The authors, arguing solely from consensus (ad pop.) among scientific experts (ad vcd.), say without evidence that speakers like us “intend to muddy the waters with respect to climate science” (ad hom.); they serially cite politicized websites and tendentious non-peer-reviewed presentations by non-climate-scientists against us as though they were authoritative (ad vcd.), while omitting to cite published rebuttals (e.g. Monckton of Brenchley, 2006, 2010) to these dubious sources (ad hom.); they accuse us of misrepresentation, distortion, and flawed analysis without adducing a single instance (ad hom.); and they four times brand us as “climate change deniers” (ad hom.) - a hate-speech comparison with Holocaust denial. Because these irrational allegations are so serious, we have insisted upon this right of reply.

The authors also say we attempt to discredit their research when, as philosophers of science from al-Haytham via Huxley to Popper (1934) make clear, error-elimination by questioning of hypotheses is essential to the scientific method. They describe “strategies” to counter us - including “public displays” and “social media” - which surely belong more in the realm of political propaganda than of scientific discourse.

Our argument against the Party line is that catastrophic manmade global warming has not been occurring at anything like the predicted rate; that there is no sound scientific reason to expect that it will; and that, even if it did, future adaptation would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective than heavy spending today.

In the generation since 1990, the observed warming rate has turned out below the least estimate projected by the IPCC in that year. The models agreed with one another, but events have proven the consensus wrong. Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half. The post-1950 warming rate, as the least-squares trend on the Hadley/CRU surface temperature series (HadCRUt3, 2011), is just 1.2 K/century. Yet IPCC (2007, table SPM.3 and fig. 10.26) implicitly predicts as the mean of all six emissions scenarios that Man’s influence, including an increase in CO2 concentration from 368 ppmv in 2000 to 713 ppmv by 2100, will cause 2.8 K warming by 2100 - 0.6 K previously committed, 1.5 K from CO2 emitted in this century, and 0.7 K from other greenhouse gases. This predicted (though unalarming) more-than-doubling of the post-1950 warming rate depends upon at least three implausible assumptions: that other gases augment CO2’s contribution to warming by as much as 43%; that as much as half of the warming caused by our past sins of emission has not yet come through the pipeline; and, above all, that unmeasured and unmeasurable temperature feedbacks will near-triple the small direct warming from greenhouse gases. Therefore, two-thirds of the consensus warming is based on a guess: and that is a poor basis for consensus.

The first assumption lacks credibility now that methane, the most significant non-CO2 greenhouse gas we emit, has stabilized: its concentration grew by only 20 parts by billion over the past decade. The second and third assumptions imply a volatility in surface temperatures that is belied by the paleoclimate record, which - allowing for great uncertainties - indicates that absolute temperature has not fluctuated by more than 3% or 8 K either side of the mean in the past 64 million years (Scotese, 1999; Zachos et al., 2001). That is enough to cause an ice age at one era and a hothouse Earth at another: but the inferred temperature variability is far too small to permit the closed-loop feedback gains of as much as 0.64[0.42, 0.74] that are implicit in the projected warming of 3.26[2, 4.5] K per CO2 doubling (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2). In process engineering, where the mathematics of feedbacks adopted by climate science has its origins (see Bode, 1945; Roe, 2009), electronic circuits intended to be stable are designed to permit closed-loop gains of no more than 0.1. Given the Earth’s formidable temperature stability, the IPCC’s implicit interval of loop gains is far too close to the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation to be credible: for across that singularity, at a loop gain of 1, strongly net-positive feedback becomes as strongly net-negative. Yet the inferred paleo-temperature record shows no such pattern of violent oscillation. Empirical evidence (e.g. Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer and Braswell, 2010, 2011), though hotly contested (e.g. Trenberth et al., 2010; Dessler et al., 2010, 2011), indeed suggests what process-engineering theory would lead us to expect: that feedbacks in the temperature-stable climate system, like those in a well-designed circuit, are at most barely net-positive and are more likely to be somewhat net-negative, consistent with a harmless continuance of the observed warming rate of the past 60 years but inconsistent with the far greater (though not necessarily harmful) warming rate predicted by the IPCC.

Even if we assume ad argumentum (and per impossibile) that our unmitigated emissions will greatly accelerate the observed warming rate, the very high cost of measures intended to mitigate CO2 emissions exceeds the likely cost of climate-related damage arising from our failure to act now. To take a single topical and typical example, carbon trading in Australia will cost $10.1 bn/year, plus $1.6 bn/year for administration (Wong, 2010, p. 5), plus $1.2 bn/year for renewables and other costs, a total of $13 bn/year, rising at 5%/year, or $130 bn by 2020 at n.p.v., to abate 5% of current emissions, which represent 1.2% of world emissions (derived from Boden et al., 2010ab). Thus the Australian measure, if it succeeded as fully as its promoters intend, would abate 0.06% of global emissions over its 10-year term. CO2 concentration would fall from a business-as-usual 410 to 409.988 ppmv by the end of the term. Forcing abated is 0.0002 W m–2; warming consequently abated is 0.00006 K; mitigation cost-effectiveness, which is the cost of abating 1 K global warming by measures of equivalent cost-effectiveness, is $2,000 tr/K. On the same basis, the cost of abating all projected warming over the ten-year life of the policy is $300 trillion, or $44,000/head, or 58% of global GDP over the period. The cost of mitigation by such measures would exceed the cost of climate-related damage consequent upon inaction by a factor of approximately 50.

The very high costs of CO2 mitigation policies and the undetectable returns in warming abated imply that focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such warming as may occur will be far more cost-effective than attempted mitigation today. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: strategies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. The question arises whether CO2 mitigation should any longer be attempted at all.

Readers of Eos may now decide for themselves to what extent the unsupported attack upon our reputations by Corbin and Katz was justifiable, and whether the editors of any respectable scientific journal of opinion should ever have printed it. True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.

CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY, Chief Policy Advisor, Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington, DC, USA; monckton@mail.co