American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt - the last living man to walk on the moon - is the latest scientist to be added to the roster of more than 70 skeptics who will confront the subject of global warming at the second annual International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10, 2009. The conference expects to draw 1,000 attendees including private-sector business people, state and federal legislators and officials, policy analysts, media, and students.
Schmitt, who earned a PhD from Harvard in geology, resigned in November from the Planetary Society, an international non-profit organization devoted to inspiring “the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere.” He is the twelfth person to walk on the Moon; as of 2008, of the nine living moonwalkers, he and his crewmate Eugene Cernan were the last two to walk there. “As a geologist, I love Earth observations,” Schmitt wrote, “But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a ‘consensus’ that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. ‘Consensus,’ as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making...”
Schmitt will be joined by more than 70 other economists, public officials, legal experts, and climate specialists calling attention to new research that contradicts claims that Earth’s moderate warming during the 20th Century primarily was man-made and has reached crisis proportions. Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, producer of the event along with more than 30 co-sponsors, explained, “At the first conference last March, we proved that the skeptics in the debate over global warming constitute the center or mainstream of the scientific community while alarmists are on the fringe.
“Now in the past nine months, the science has grown even more convincing that global warming is not a crisis. Also suggesting this ‘crisis’ is over are opinion polls in the U.S. and around the globe and political events, including the decisive defeat of ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation in the U.S. Senate last spring. The crisis has been cancelled by sound science and common-sense.”
In additon to Schmidt, speakers will include Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT, Dr. Roy Spencer. Dr. William Gray, John Coleman, Dr. Paul Reiter, Dr. Bod Carter, Benny Peiser, Christopher Monckton, Dr. Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre as well as Anthony Watts. Read full release here.
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Photo courtesy of the Energy Tribune. Also courtesy of Responsible Energy this video on the The Obama Energy Plan, what can we expect? in miniature below:
I’m the NOAA co-op observer for Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado, elevation 8950 feet, in the foothills NW of Denver. Here is a graph of average temperatures for the past ten years. 2008 is by far the coldest year in the past decade, with an average of 39F.
That’s full 3 degrees F colder than 2003. Each of the past five years is colder than any of the previous five years. This is only one station of the thousands in the NOAA co-op network, but I thought I’d show you the data before it’s adjusted and homogenized by the usual suspects.
Here’s a photo of the station in January 2007, in the midst of a record round of snow storms in Colorado.
It seems that NASA’s James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), is at it again. He just can’t let the data speak for itself. In yet another egregious display of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) arrogance, he changed the temperature data from 1910-2008 to reflect what is clearly a cooling trend to reflect a warming trend. (Y-axis = Annual Mean Temperatures in centigrade; X-axis = Year)
These are the USHCN (United States Historical Climatology Network) “raw” and “homogenized” data plots from the GISTEMP (GISS Surface Temperature) website synthesized into one chart with polynomial fit trend lines. As seen in this comparison chart, the Blue Lines represent raw data—clearly indicating a cooling trend. Whereas the Red Lines are the adjusted trends after subjected to Hansen’s own curiously compensating algorithm. Junk in = Junk out.
Indeed this past year (2008) is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released this month by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Great Britain. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.
Nevertheless, global warming partisans at the Met and elsewhere have taken to assuring everyone that cool temperatures are “absolutely not” evidence that global warming is on the wane. Yet those warning and cautionary adamancies are always absent when it comes to linking heat waves to global warming. “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Lewis Carroll.
However, One major glitch in the reporting of temperatures has been quietly forgotten by the Met and others of AGW persuasion as documented here.... When the Soviet Union fell in 1990 the number of reporting weather stations around the world declined from a high of 15,000 in 1970 to 5,000 in 2000, no appropriate compensatory weighting mechanism was thereafter applied. Such an absence critically skews everything thereafter to the warmer side of things, since it takes some of the coldest places on the planet (like Siberia) out of the equation. With that absence, it’s likely getting colder than we now know. How convenient!
Said Geophysicist Dr. David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma who has published numerous peer-reviewed research articles:
“Environmental extremists and global warming alarmists are in denial and running for cover. To the extent global warming was ever valid, it is now officially over. It is time to file this theory in the dustbin of history, next to Aristotelean physics, Neptunism, the geocentric universe, phlogiston, and a plethora of other incorrect scientific theories, all of which had vocal and dogmatic supporters who cited incontrovertible evidence. Weather and climate change are natural processes beyond human control. To argue otherwise is to deny the factual evidence.” Read more here.
The big freeze will envelop the South tonight as the Arctic weather conditions send temperatures plunging as low as minus 10C (14F).
Scotland has borne the brunt of the cold weather so far, but Met Office forecasts suggest that England and Wales are about to suffer the worst temperatures, with a similar freeze on Wednesday night across Wales and southern England. Even during the day, temperatures are unlikely to stay above freezing in many places.
To add to the misery, a belt of sleet and snow showers running down through East Anglia and the South East could leave 1cm (0.4in) of snow on the ground this morning. It could also wash away the grit spread by councils during the night and leave widespread ice on roads and pavements during the morning rush hour.
This brief shower aside, conditions are set to remain dry in what is becoming a very dry winter. However, with such thick frost expected this week it could look like snow first thing in the morning. And because conditions are also calm, with hardly a whiff of a breeze, there will be plenty of dense freezing fog hanging around. This can produce the strange sight of ice crystals falling out of the air and settling on the ground, which can look like snow has fallen.
Extreme cold such as this is often seen in the glens of the Highlands during winter, but is more unusual farther south. The coldest temperature in England last winter was minus 10C at Copley, Co Durham, in February, but the cold was not as widespread, nor as prolonged, as the present bout. Mid-January is often the coldest time of the year, even though the daylight is growing longer, as an old saying goes: “As the days grow longer, the cold grows stronger.” This is because the seas around Britain take a long time to lose their heat stored up from last summer and, as they grow colder through January, they give less insulation from cold blasts of air sweeping down from the North or East.
The problem this winter is that the weather is stuck in a rut. For weeks, high pressure has sat over or very close to the UK, blowing a steady stream of cold air off continental Europe and trapping the cold down on the ground. Because this type of weather blocks out our usual wet but mild Atlantic weather it is called a “blocking pattern”, and is difficult to budge.
There are signs that by the end of this week the high pressure system may start to slip southwards and open the door for Atlantic depressions to roll back in, bringing a welcome blast of mild, but wet air. And the Met Office still stands by its long-range forecast of a milder end to the winter.Even if this winter proves to be the coldest for many years, both here and in other regions of the world, it makes little difference to the overall trend in global climate. The weather can fluctuate wildly from year to year, but the big picture becomes clear only over decades and centuries.
Even in medieval times, when the climate in Europe was fairly benign, there were some astonishingly brutal winters. In 1205, for example, the Thames froze from mid-January until March. As one chronicler recorded: “No ground could be tilled, and frozen ale and wine were sold by weight.” Read more here.
Another busted UKMO forecast this year. And now they point to cold spells even in the Medieval Warm Period. I guess even they regard Mann’s hockey stick to be a fantasy. Ironically the cold of the last two years has forced them to admit the importance of La Nina and El Nino to climate. Now if they would also recognize the importance of the PDO which causes a predominance of La Ninas for decades at a time (since 1998 and back from 1947 to 1977) and El Ninos at other times (1979-1998). It is a true climate driver capable of overwhelming any of man’s influences, especially greenhouse gases.
Researchers in Australia say the growth of coral on the country’s iconic Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has fallen since 1990 to its lowest rate in 400 years, variations of this message have been repeated around the world from South Korea to London with global warming, and the associated acidification of oceans, claimed to be the cause. These reports are repeating claims in an Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) media release made just last Friday to coincide with the publication of research findings in the journal Science.
The media release also claimed the research to be “the most comprehensive study to date on calcification rates of GBR corals”. Having followed GBR issues for many years I was surprised to hear global warming associated with slow coral growth rates, indeed AIMS’s researchers Janice Lough and David Barnes have published detailed studies concluding that coral growth rates increase significantly with an increase in annual average sea surface temperature.
Furthermore growth rates actually decrease from north to south along the GBR as this corresponds with a cooling temperature gradient of 2-3 degrees C. If there has been a slowing in growth rates of coral over the last nearly 20 years, as suggested by this new research, a most obvious question for me would be: Have GBR waters cooled?
This new research paper in Science presents evidence for a decline in coral growth rates since 1990, but no credible reason for the decline. While the study hints that the cause could be ocean acidification no direct evidence is provided to support this claim - not even a correlation. Indeed no data is presented to suggest the PH (a measure of acidity) of GBR waters has changed, and based on modelling of hypothetical changes in PH associated with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide there is a timing problem - the decline in calcification rates should apparently have started years earlier.
Confronted with a lack of evidence in support of this hypothesis - that ocean acidification has caused the drop in growth rates - the researchers suggest in the paper “synergistic effects of several forms of environmental stress” and implicate higher temperatures. But no data is presented in the paper to contradict the well established relationship between increasing temperature and increasing growth rates - though various confusing statements are made and it is suggested that global warming has increased the incidence of heat stress in turn reducing growth rates - while at the same time the researchers acknowledge higher growth rates in northern, warmer, GBR waters.
Marine Biologist Walter Starck has perhaps aptly described the research as part of “the proliferation of subprime research presenting low value findings as policy grade evidence” and has suggested this has “science headed in the same direction as Wall Street.” Read full post and more here
See this analysis by John McLean of ocean temperatures on the Great Barrier reef here. See this post here and a site full of information here.
