You knew it was coming. The alarmists and media have been frustrated in their efforts to report global warming evidence as nature has refused to cooperate. Temperatures have been declining for going on 7 years (accelerated this year) even as CO2 increased 3.5%. After a record low arctic ice extent last year, a cold winter brought Total Northern Hemisphere snow and ice cover to record high levels in January and arctic ice back to near normal. Snow and cold were replacing heat and drought in the news. They had to resort to blaming snowmelt and spring rain flooding and spring tornadoes and the annual western wildfires on global warming. 

This summer, the media had to search for stories like a cracks in a Greenland glacier and the Wilkins Ice Sheet (ignoring experts stating that such cracks were not unusual) and a NSDIC press release that predicted this summer arctic ice might approach or exceed the record set last year because so much of the ice that formed was first year ice after the unusual wind patterns last summer dumped more than normal ice into the Atlantic.  First year ice would be thinner and more easily melted.

Ironically just last year a NSIDC story correctly summarized the findings of many researchers and peer review papers that natural warming and cooling cycles in the Atlantic and Pacific were the real drivers for the cyclical changes in arctic ice over the centuries (as we have shown most recently here) when a scientist there correctly noted in October 2007:

“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth. Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss. Many questions still remain to be answered, but these changes in ocean circulation may be important keys for understanding the observed loss of Arctic sea ice.”

This year that scientist was replaced by senior scientist Mark Serreze who predicted the ice might disappear and attributed the loss to global warming. This week he wrote and the media gladly reported the ice had diminished rapidly this month and now moved 2008 past 2005 into 2nd place behind 2007 in the record since it began in 1979.

The AP’s Seth Borenstein gleefully wrote: “More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming “tipping point” in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes: Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is at its second lowest level in about 30 years. Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But over the years, more of the ice is lost to the sea with less of it recovered in winter. While ice reflects the sun’s heat, the open ocean absorbs more heat and the melting accelerates warming in other parts of the world. Sea ice also serves as primary habitat for threatened polar bears. “We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said senior scientist Mark Serreze at the data center in Boulder, Colo. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.” Within “five to less than 10 years,” the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally. “It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody’s really taken into account that change yet,” he said.”

The drop off this month occurred after a breakdown of the spring and summer pattern which caused shifts in the wind flows that broke up more thin ice than normal even though the air was cold. But the sun is vanishing and the air growing colder and the the melting is slowing. See this plot from the University of Illinois Cryosphere which monitors arctic ice. Note the blip up at the end indicating a slowing of the melt short of 2007.

See larger image here

And as for the warming coming more quickly than any model see here how the IPCC climate model forecasts from 2006 are performing relative to the actual temperatures. The yellow line makes the assumption that CO2 is not rising.

See larger image here See how Borenstein’s idol Hansen’s models are doing here. See pdf of this story here. See pdf of this story

Streaming video of the press conference to unveil the “Punishers of the Poor” at the Democratic National Convention in Denver can be seen here.

“These six politicians are the leaders and generals in charge of waging an unprecedented war on the poor,” said Niger Innis, National Spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality and co-chairman of the Alliance to Stop the War on the Poor. “By pushing policies that restrict American energy supply and thus push prices higher, they are delivering daily punishment to low-income and poor families across the nation.  What these politicians are doing is immoral, and we intend to wake up the American people to the fact that this war being waged in every city in America today.”

“We call this a war on the poor because high energy prices disproportionately impact America’s poor and low-income families,” said Bishop Harry Jackson, Chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition and national co-chair of the Alliance. “With prices expected to rise this winter from 25 to 50 percent, we are in a true crisis.  These prices are actually a highly regressive tax on America’s most vulnerable citizens. The war on the poor must stop.  To do that, we must increase our supply of all energy resources, including coal, oil and gas, nuclear power—and encourage greater conservation.”

“High prices hit poor families hardest,” said Bishop Phillip Porter, Chair of Colorado Consumers for Affordable Energy and the founder of All Nations Pentecostal Church of God in Christ in Aurora, Colorado. “A recent study shows that while median income families have to devote five cents on a dollar of their income to energy costs, poor families have to devote upwards of 50 cents on the dollar.  That is fifty cents they can’t spend on health care, or education or food.” “The poor are being decimated by high energy prices, which are also driving up food costs and other necessities of life,” said Ralph Conner of the non-partisan Heartland Institute

Dennis Sykes, Chairman of Colorado Veterans for Energy Security, “Unless we as a nation become energy independent, we will have to continue sending U.S. troops overseas to die on foreign soil defending our access to foreign energy.  That is unacceptable.”

The coalition leaders said the ongoing “punishers of the poor” expose will be bipartisan, with both Republicans and Democrats named as punishers.

Recently in Washington, D.C., leaders from the civil rights, African American, faith-based, senior, agriculture and consumer advocacy communities launched a national campaign to publicly unmask more than 100 politicians and 50 environmental extremist groups that are waging an immoral “war on the poor” by pushing policies that limit America’s ability to produce more America energy and drive energy prices skyward.  See more here.

By Will Alexander on CO2 Skeptic via Hans Schreuder

While the globe was still warming and environmentalist claims were modest, the IPCC’s case was impregnable. In these modern times the environmentalists fed the media with scare stories in order to advance their cause. The media in turn had little interest in repeating the same warnings month after month. So, climate alarmists were forced to increase the level of alarmism. Environmental terrorism is the result. These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs).

To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.

This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago.

I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account.
These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.

There was a time in my life when spreading alarm and despondency was a punishable offence. Cowardice in the face of the enemy could result in facing a firing squad. I swore an oath of allegiance to my country. Today there are no such legal or moral standards. Read full story here.