By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph
The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”. Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times. Read more here
See larger image here.
By KHQ-TV
On Christmas Eve, Gov. Chris Gregoire proclaimed a state of emergency in Washington due to the state’s ongoing series of winter weather and storms. Gregoire notes snowfall has reached record or near-record level in 30 of Washington’s 39 counties.The proclamation enables the state to respond quickly to local requests for emergency support and assistance arising from new storms.Prior to the Governor’s declaration the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) convened an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss current conditions and the forecast for two major winter storm systems that could bring another 18 inches of fresh snow to the region. Seattle photo shown.
The County Commissioners were also briefed that road crews have finished plowing primary arterials and emergency routes, and are currently working on secondary arterials and well-traveled hills. With more snow in the forecast through Monday, residential areas may not be serviced for several days. Read more here. Also Seattle’s use of sand on icy roads called more environmentally harmful than salt. Read more here.
As Tom Nelson’s blog post indicates, this is a source of major embarrassment to the governor who on the first day of the 2008 legislative session, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced a multifaceted climate change bill that could dramatically reshape the state’s economy. Despite the time squeeze, Gregoire urged action on the global warming bill. “The future of our economy, the future of our great state is at stake,” she said. King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels joined Gregoire at Monday’s media event held at McKinstry Co., a Seattle business lauded for its environmentally friendly approach to mechanical construction and engineering.”
Icecap Note: According to a Seattle resident who wrote Icecap, more snow has fallen in the Seattle area recently than any other time except the winter of 1942-43. “I am a Seattle native and 78. I had a paper route in 1942 and had to slog through snow 2 to 3 feet deep dragging a sled. This snow pack remained for four or five weeks.” He continued “The real stupidity by far is that of Mayor Nickels, who prohibited the use of salt on roads because it might harm fish in Puget Sound (salt water). The spin from the mayor is that rubber edges on plow blades that pack the snow on the roads rather than remove it is used in NY and Chicago, both of which have flat terrain while Seattle’s is more hilly than SF. Nickels and the entire city council should be recalled for stupidity.”
Greg Nickels recall proclaimed in 2007 a 50% reduction the Pacific Northwest snowfall based on the bogus study by State Climatologist Phil Mote published by the AMS which cherry picked the start and end time of the snowpack analysis - choosing the very snowy 1950 to start. We noted that in a story, given the flip back to the cold PDO, the snow drought may be over and indeed the last two years have seen record or near record snowpacks. No word from Mote or Nickels. Perhaps they are snowed in.
Our Seattle emailer also noted “Gregroire’s pride is enacting the Western Climate Initiative (Little Kyoto cap and trade system) involving 7 states and 4 Canadian Provences. Already a hundred or so employees are busy inventorying emission levels and determining the CO2 emission quotas for all emitters notwithstanding the fact that WA has one of the smallest carbon footprints in the nation. A $6.5 billion deficit is anticipated for the current budget cycle, that is large enough to bankrupt the state. They seem determined to ruin the economy while solving non-existent problems.
EPW Minority Blog
Joins Senate Report of More Than 650 Dissenting Scientists. Award winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who was reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore’s scientific views, has now declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken.”
“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken,” Happer, who has published over 200 scientific papers, told EPW on December 22, 2008. Happer made his remarks while requesting to join the 2008 U.S. Senate Minority Report from Environment and Public Works Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-OK) of over 650 (and growing) dissenting international scientists disputing anthropogenic climate fears. [Note: Joining Happer as new additions to the Senate report, are at least 8 more scientists, including meteorologists from Germany, Netherlands and CNN, as well as a professors from MIT and University of Arizona. For full quotes and bios of the new skeptical scientists added to the groundbreaking report, which includes many current and former UN IPCC scientists.]
“I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly,” Happer said this week. Happer is a Professor at the Department of Physics at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Senator Inhofe said that the continued outpouring of prominent scientists like Happer—who are willing to publicly dissent from climate fears—are yet another strike to the UN, Gore and the media’s claims about global warming. “The endless claims of a ‘consensus’ about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day,” Inhofe said.
Happer, who served as the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy in 1993, says he was fired by Gore in 1993 for not going along with Gore’s scientific views on ozone and climate issues. “I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy,” Happer explained in 1993.
“I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow,” Happer said this week. “Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth’s climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past,” he added.
“Over the past 500 million years since the Cambrian, when fossils of multicellular life first became abundant, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been much higher than current levels, about 3 times higher on average. Life on earth flourished with these higher levels of carbon dioxide,” he explained. “Computer models used to generate frightening scenarios from increasing levels of carbon dioxide have scant credibility,” Happer added.
Read more and access info on the well over 650 scientists now challenging man through greenhouse gases as the primary driver of climate change here.