Heavy snow is forecast this weekend in Wyoming, snow and ice mar Victoria Day holiday weekend in Timmins, Canada while heavy snows bury northwest China. In the Southern hemisphere, an early Australian snowstorm delights skiers and record cold is reported with some casualties in South Africa including first snow in Georgetown in 33 years.

Update (5/28/07):  In Calgary, Alberta in Canada a late snow downed power lins and trees while a late snow hits North Dakota. Also it is so cold in Britain that snow may fall in east Anglia and Scotland.

Update (5/29/07) Two dead in french snowstorms, spring snow creates havic in Switzerland, freak snowstorm hits Nepal, cold prompts record demand for energy in Argentina .

Update (5/30/07) from an Icecap member in Brazil, Eugenio Hackbart of MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center, one of the most important private weather organizations in Latin America, comes word that snow fell in the higher elevation of Southern Brazil over this past week and that next week could be even colder with low temperatures not seen in that part of the globe during the month of May in the last 20 to 30 years.  South America is under a sequence of cold blasts not seen since the very cold climatic winter of 2000 (La Niña), Eugenio reported.

Update: (6/1/07) Argentinian cold wave in which the country was beset by the coldest May since 1962 led to electricity and natural gas shortages this week, idling factories and taxis and causing sporadic blackouts in the capital.

Climate Science has selected two errors in Chapter 1 of the 2007 WG1 IPCC Report to highlight in this weblog.

(1) “This is the so-called butterfly effect: a butterfly flapping its wings (or some other small phenomenon) in one place can, in principle, alter the subsequent weather pattern in a distant place. At the core of this effect is chaos theory, which deals with how small changes in certain variables can cause apparent randomness in complex systems.” [page 105]

(2) The second error (and it is a big one) is their unsubstantiated claim that “Projecting changes in climate due to changes in greenhouse gases 50 years from now is a very different and much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now. To put it another way, long-term variations brought about by changes in the composition of the atmosphere are much more predictable than individual weather events.” [from page 105]

This is a remarkable claim, and forms the basis of the entire IPCC concept. This is such an absurd, scientifically unsupported claim, that the media and any scientists who swallow this conclusion are either blind to the scientific understanding of the climate system, or have other motives to promote the IPCC viewpoint. The absurdity of the IPCC claim should be obvious to anyone with common sense.  See in his blog post and links within to earlier blogposts why these two assumptions are blatantly in error.

UPDATE: Roger followed this up with the following blog on why Climate Prediction is More Difficult than Weather Prediction and check out American Thinker’s coverage of Roger’s blogs on the climate models here

German scientists re-examining projected melting of Arctic permafrost from global warming say massive releases of methane are unlikely this century. Scientists say as the Earth’s climate warms, permafrost will continue melting and methane bound in frozen sediments could escape into the atmosphere. Because methane is a greenhouse gas, that would exacerbate global warming.

One permafrost model, presented in late 2005, indicated near-surface Arctic permafrost would completely degrade during the 21st century. But Georg Delisle and colleagues at the Federal Institution for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hanover offer an alternative model designed to have a more complete mathematical formulation of the physical processes in permafrost. The German researchers note that ice-core analyses previously made by other scientists indicate minimal release of methane during warm periods occurring during the last 9,000 years.

Based on the new model and the ice-core findings, Delisle concluded that scenarios calling for massive releases of methane in the near future from degrading permafrost are questionable.

The research is detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. See full story here

It was an e-mail from a fella named Gerald in the Niagara region, that indicates just how good a job the man-made global warming believers have been at selling their message. “If humans are not the cause of global warming ... who is?” Gerald wrote. My response was: “Gee, Gerald. Can you really not think of anything? Nothing at all?” Then I suggested he find the nearest child and ask them what makes the earth warm. The next day I got a reply. “Do you mean the sun?” he queried, in all sincerity. “Yes, Gerald. That big, burning yellow ball up in the sky is, not surprisingly, the main driver of global warming.”

Yesterday, world renowned paleoclimatologist and geology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Dr. Tim Patterson, was in Calgary to pass that basic message on. He brought reams of proof, scientific studies, graphs and the like to back up his claims.  Indeed, one of the more interesting, if not alarming statements Patterson is that by about the year 202, solar cycle 25 will be the weakest one since the Little Ice Age (that started in the 13th century and ended around 1860) a time when people living in London, England, used to walk on a frozen Thames River and food was scarcer.

“This should be a great strategic concern in Canada because nobody is farming north of us.” In other words, Canada—the great bread basket of the world—just might not be able to grow grains in much of the prairies.  After the Little Ice Age, “things warmed up precipitously with no help from carbon dioxide,” pointed out Patterson. Indeed, the world warmed up until about 1940 and then the temperatures started to fall until the late 1970s when scientists started predicting another ice age. “Post World War II, as the world started cooling, CO2 was going up like crazy. All the evidence shows that warming periods were all solar driven and that there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature. That, however, is expected to come to an end in 2020.

As the saying goes, by then all of the billions of dollars wasted battling CO2 emissions, rather than pollutants, for instance, will be money pumped down the CO2 sink hole. In 2020 hindsight on the great global warming scare will be 20/20. It won’t be a pretty picture.  See full story here

One of the fundamental pillars of the hypothesis that humanity is causing dangerous climate change is the belief that levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have been rising steadily since the start of the industrial revolution. But what if CO2 levels have not increased? How could our emissions of this otherwise benign gas then have anything to do with the past century’s modest warming?

The most accurate way to determine the atmosphere’s average CO2 content is to simply conduct a direct chemical analysis at many different places and times. Fortunately, there are more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods between 1857 and 1957. However, in what appears to be a case of ‘cherry-picking’ data to fit a pre-determined conclusion, only the lower level CO2 data were included when the pre-industrial average was calculated? This is the average that was used to supposedly ‘validate’ the long term ice core records on which Al Gore and others depend.

In a new scientific paper in the journal Energy and Environment, German researcher Ernst-Georg Beck, shows that the pre-industrial level is some 50 ppm higher than the level used by computer models that produce all future climate predictions. Completely at odds with the smoothly increasing levels found in the ice core records, Beck concludes, “Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated, exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942, the latter showing more than 400 ppm.”

In a paper submitted to US Senate Committee hearings, Polish Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, a veteran mountaineer who has excavated ice from 17 glaciers on six continents, stated bluntly, “The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic [human] causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false.” See full story here

Both Beck’s paper and Jarowoski’s testimony can be found in our Climate Library at Beck 2007 and Jarowoski 2004 US Senate Testimony. From what I have read from Beck and heard directly from Jarowoski and Segalstad in Europe, there is real reason to believe this other fundamental pillar of the whole AGW movement needs a fresh look much like the temperatures. We will be addressing both issues in upcoming blogs.