Frozen in Time
Jul 15, 2009
UW-Milwaukee Study Could Realign Climate Change Theory

WISN ABC, Milwaukee, WI

Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift.

The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.

The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.

However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

“Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate,” researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

“In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century,” Tsonis said. “The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.”

The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000. Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?

“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand—first the natural variability of climate—and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs. Read more here.

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See how well the annual US temperatures (USHCNv2) synchronously changes with both the oceans (PDO + AMO) and sun (Hoyt Schatten Willson Total Solar Irradiance or TSI calibrated to ACRIM). Enlarged here. Similarities exist with the early 1960s.

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Longest streak of negative PDO since the Moon Landing
By Alexandre Aguiar, MetSul Weather Center, Porto Alegre - Brazil

The new released data by the University of Washington indicates another negative month for the PDO. The value for the month of June was -0.31. According to the data from the University of Washington, the current streak of negative PDO is one of the longest in one hundred years. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is negative for 22 consecutive months. The last time the PDO had a positive monthly value was in August 2007.

Sep-07 -0.36
Oct-07 -1.45
Nov-07 -1.08
Dec-07 -0.58
Jan-08 -1.00
Feb-08 -0.77
Mar-08 -0.71
Apr-08 -1.52
May-08 -1.37
Jun-08 -1.34
Jul-08 -1.67
Aug-08 -1.70
Sep-08 -1.55
Oct-08 -1.76
Nov-08 -1.25
Dec-08 -0.87
Jan-09 -1.40
Feb-09 -1.55
Mar-09 -1.59
Apr-09 -1.65
May-09 -0.88
Jun-09 -0.31

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See larger image here.

Prior to that, since 1900, there were very few periods with so many consecutive months presenting negative values: 20 months from July 1998 to February 2000; 19 months from December 1974 to June 1976; 20 months from December 1972 to July 1974; 23 months from August 1966 to June 1968; 28 months from May 1961 to August 1963; 25 months from February 1955 to February 1957; and 36 months from July 1948 to June 1951. In other words, this is the longest period of consecutive months of negative PDO in four decades. The last time the PDO stayed negative for some many months in a row was just before the man landed in the Moon, a milestone the world will remember this July 20th 2009.

Read more here.

Jul 13, 2009
Global Cooling Chills Summer 2009

By Deroy Murdock, NRO Contributing Author

As cap-and-trade advocates tie their knickers in knots over so-called “global warming,” Mother Nature refuses to cooperate. Earth’s temperatures continue a chill that began 11 years ago. As global cooling accelerates, global-warmists kick, scream, and push their pet theory—just like little kids who cover their ears and stomp their feet when older children tell them not to bother waiting up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

Consider how the globe cooled last month:

-- June in Manhattan averaged 67.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.7 degrees below normal—the coldest average since 1958. The National Weather Service stated July 1: “The last time that Central Park hit 85 in May...but not in June was back in 1903.” Icecap Note: The Weather Channel reported that New York City has experienced the 2nd coolest June 1 to July 13 period with an average temperature of just 68.4F. The coolest occurred in 1881 with an average temperature of 67.8F.

-- In Phoenix, June’s high temperatures were below 100 degrees for 15 days straight, the first such June since 1913. In California’s desert, Yucca Valley’s June average was 83.5, 8.5 degrees below normal. Downtown Los Angeles averaged 74.5 degrees, five below normal.

-- Boston saw temperatures 4.7 degrees below normal. “This is the second coldest average high temp since 1872,” veteran meteorologist and Weather Channel alumnus Joseph D’Aleo reports at Icecap.com. “It has been so cool and so cloudy that trees in northern New England are starting to show colors that normally first appear in September.” Looking abroad, D’Aleo noted: “Southern Brazil had one of the coldest Junes in decades, and New Zealand has had unusual cold and snow again this year.”

-- New Zealand’s National Climate Centre issued a June 2 press release headlined, “TEMPERATURE: LOWEST EVER FOR MAY FOR MANY AREAS, COLDER THAN NORMAL FOR ALL.”

-- South African officials say cold weather killed two vagrants in the Eastern Cape. Both slept outdoors June 26 and froze to death.

FREAK SUMMER STORM DUMPS SNOW (HAIL) ON YONKERS,” the New York Post blared after a July 8 storm brought acccumulating hail to that city just north of Gotham. That same day, the high temperature reached 65 degrees at O’Hare International Airport, making it Chicago’s coldest July 8 since 1891. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, Australia, temperatures have been 10 degrees below average, while frost has covered lawns and windshields. On July 13, Albert Gore will appear in Melbourne to explain to Australians that they are shivering due to warming.

Simmer down, global-warmists retort. These are mere anecdotes, hand-picked to make them look silly.

Well, one would be foolish to challenge space-born satellites that gauge Earth’s mean temperatures ---cold, hot, and average. Here again, evidence of global cooling accumulates like snow drifts.

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Larger image here.

“There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998, and global cooling for the past few years,” former U.S. Senate Environment Committee spokesman Marc Morano writes at ClimateDepot.com. Citing metrics gathered by University of Alabama, Huntsville’s Dr. Roy Spencer, Morano adds: “The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveal yet another drop in Earth’s temperature ... Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.”

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Larger image here.

Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half-century.

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For December 1958, the Laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.

This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global warming as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.

So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Kyoto Protocols, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.

It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our healthcare system’s serious maladies.

But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Jul 13, 2009
In Melbourne: Big Al, Small Protest

By Jennifer Marohasy

Anyone who denies global warming is in the pay of big oil. Remember that is what the big man, Al Gore, said in his movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. But like so much that Mr Gore says, it just isn’t true.

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The above photograph (enlarged here), via Leon Ashby, shows demonstrators at Dockland Peninsula this morning.

Consider the 30-odd protesters who held placards outside the breakfast he spoke at this morning in Melbourne. The scruffy-lot, lead by a farmer Leon Ashby, were not there because someone paid them, but because they are outraged by Al Gore and what he has thrust on the world. In particular, his belief that we already have a climate crisis and that the only solution is carbon trading.

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It might also sound well meaning. But it is going to be expensive. Indeed, quoting Ronald Bailey from Reason magazine, cap and trade in the US will be the largest corporate welfare program ever enacted in the history of the United States. And the corporations hope government is just as generous to them here in Australia.

Indeed if there were any in the pay of big oil at Dockland Peninsula this morning, they would have been inside applauding the big man.

Has the big end of town ever taken to holding placards? I don’t think so.

A protest like the one in Melbourne this morning was about the seemingly disempowered and disenfranchised attempting to be heard. Of course history is replete with stories of such groups finding their voice and a crowd - eventually. See post here.

Links and Notes

Leon Ashby heads a new political party called ‘The Climate Sceptics’

There have been other protests in the US at the University of Texas Austin:

Jul 10, 2009
Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick

By James Delingpole Wednesday, 8th July 2009

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book

Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill - the largest tax in American history - which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.

Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change.

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‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

To find out why, let’s meet the good professor. He’s a tanned, rugged, white-haired sixtysomething - courteous and jolly but combative when he needs to be - glowing with the health of a man who spends half his life on field expeditions to Iran, Turkey and his beloved Outback. And he’s sitting in my garden drinking tea on exactly the kind of day the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot would probably like to ban. A lovely warm sunny one.

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact - which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.

Read more here.

Jul 09, 2009
Luetkemeyer Bill Would Save Taxpayers $12.5 Million, Denies Funding for UN’s Junk Science

WASHINGTON, D.C.  U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-9) today introduced legislation that would save taxpayers $12.5 million this year and millions more in the future by prohibiting the United States from contributing to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is fraught with waste and is engaged in dubious science. 

“We all know that the UN is incompetent when it comes to spending money, and that is why American taxpayers should not be forking over millions more to one of its organizations that not only is in need of significant reform but is engaged in dubious scientific quests,” Luetkemeyer said. “Folks in Missouri and across the country are tired of this never ending government spending spree, and my goal is to deliver some of our people’s hard-earned money back into their pocketbooks instead of spending it on international junk science.”

Luetkemeyer’s legislation would prohibit U.S. contributions to the IPCC, which is nothing more than a group of U.N. bureaucrats that supports man-made claims on global warming that many scientists disagree with. More than 700 international scientists signed on to the U.S. Senate Minority Report expressing their concerns about man-made claims on global warming promoted by the UN IPCC. The dissenting scientists are more than 13 times the number of UN scientists, 52, who authored a report claiming that human emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for dangerous and unprecedented warming. The dissenting scientists are from all over the world, including Japan, Italy, UK, Czech Republic, Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S. that are affiliated with institutions including, NASA, U.S. Navy, U.S. Defense Department, Energy Department, U.S. Air Force and the EPA. 

Meanwhile, our very own Environmental Protection Agency recently reported that we are undergoing a period of worldwide cooling. Luetkemeyer also filed the legislation as an amendment to the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act.  Supporters of the cap-and-trade legislation are using the questionable findings by the UN IPCC as one reason to support the onerous legislation, which is nothing more than a national energy tax and will be debated soon by the U.S. Senate. Luetkemeyer voted against this legislation and will continue to voice his concerns with the majority’s cap-and-tax legislation. Read more here.

Here is an idea that makes sense. Next we can cut the billions the administration wants to spend on super computers and climate change research which has led us down all the wrong paths. We can put that money to better use on tapping into the many energy sources at our disposal that will help us become more energy independent and propel economic growth.

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