Political Climate
Jan 30, 2011
Is It Really the Warmest Ever?

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM in the Energy Tribune

Both NOAA and NASA this month announced that 2010 was tied for the warmest year. The UK Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University proclaimed 2010 the second warmest year since 1850.

But after the incredibly cold and snowy winters in 2008/09 and 2009/10 and so far in 2010/11, those claims are falling on increasingly deaf ears. The public doubt about global warming has been increasing given the Climategate disclosures suggesting scientists have been ‘cooking the books’, especially when earlier promises of warm, snowless mid-latitude winters failed miserably.

Back on March 20, 2000, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported Dr. David Viner’s of the UK’s Climate Research Unit warning that within a few years snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event.” Indeed, Viner opined, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Similarly, David Parker, at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said that eventually British children could have only “virtual” experience of snow via movies and the Internet.

The last three winters in the UK were forecast by the UK Met Office to be mild and snowless. Instead, brutal cold and snow in the UK has the UK Met Office on their heels. Indeed the cold and snow was a throwback to the age of Dickens in the early 1800s. UK MPs called for Official Parliamentary Probe into whether the UKMO reliance on their ideology and CO2 models had biased their predictions.

In the United States, NOAA echoing the UN IPCC, claimed snow would retreat north with the storm tracks and major cities would get more rain and mild winters. The Union of Concerned Scientists said in 2006 scientists claim winters were becoming warmer and less snowy. In 2008, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bemoaned that children would be robbed of the childhood joys of sledding and skiing in the DC area due to global warming. A year later, the area set a new seasonal snowfall record with 5 to 6 feet of snow and sleds and skis were the only way to get around.

The winter of 2009/10 was the coldest ever in parts of the southeast, and in parts of Siberia and the coldest since 1977/78 or 1962/63 in many parts of the United States, Europe and Asia.

The spirits of alarmists and their cheerleaders in the media were buoyed by the hot summer in the eastern United States and western Russia even though that is the normal result when a strong La Nina follows on the heels of a strong El Nino winter. But as is usually the case in La Ninas, global cooling usually follows within 6 months. Indeed, temperatures plunged as winter approached and this past December (2010) was the second coldest in the entire Central England Temperature record extending back to 1659. It was the coldest ever December in diverse locations like Ireland, Sweden, and Florida.

Reluctantly, alarmists and their cheerleaders in the media changed their tune and the promise of warm and snowless winters with ‘global warming’ morphed into global warming means cold and snowy winters. ABC News even said cold and snowy winters would be the new norm because of global warming. Non sequiturs like that have sadly become ‘the new norm’ in the wacky world of the mainstream media.

In Australia, the government’s Bureau of Meteorology and university alarmist scientists promised major drought and blocked dams and flood mitigation projects, but when devastating floods occurred this summer, they blamed that on global warming and again enviros and government agencies escaped the blame. Other scientists had warned that changes in the Pacific would lead to a return of the flood years like 1974, but they were ignored by agenda driven, green leaning government.

In fact environmentalists and alarmist scientists have reinvented global warming and now attribute all weather to global warming - cold, warm, drought and flood. They call it ‘climate disruption’. But the climate has not been cooperating in a way that is convincing the public they have to sacrifice even more to stop a problem they don’t sense is real. Just imagine if they knew how much they really would cost (trillions - several thousands of dollars per year per family) and how little these deep sacrifices would change the climate (not measureable).

Despite claims to the contrary, in recent years, global temperatures stopped warming. Even Phil Jones of the UK Climate Research Unit after Climategate admitted there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995 (15 years) and between 2002 and 2009, the global temperatures had declined 0.12C (0.22F).

Read much more in the story here.

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See how cold it has been from December 1, 2010 to January 26, 2011, expecially in the southeast for the second straight winter.

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Enlarged here.

The equivalent period last year (enlarged here).

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No end in sight yet to the cold and snow. Model temperature anomaly forecasts for week 2 (days 8-14 or February 5-12th at 850mb or about 5000 feet) (enlarged here).

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/destroying-evidence-at-the-ministry-of-truth/
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Jan 30, 2011
Holdren cites education ‘problem’ on climate - Mr Holdren it’s you that need to be educated

By Ben Geman - The Hill

President Obama’s top science adviser said there’s a need to “educate” GOP climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill as the White House seeks to advance its green energy agenda.

“It is an education problem. I think we have to educate them,” said John Holdren, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in an interview broadcast Sunday. Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, called for deriving 80 percent of U.S. power from “clean” sources by 2035, and funding increased R&D of green electricity and fuels by repealing billions of dollars in oil industry tax breaks.

But the effort comes as a substantial number of GOP lawmakers, such as House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Ralph Hall (R-Texas), are questioning climate science.

Read more if you can stomach him here.

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Climate Depot note: It is Holdren who desperately needs remedial climate science education! See here and more below:

Scientific Rube?: John Holdren ridiculed for claiming Arctic could be ICE FREE WINTER! Holdren ‘appears to have less scientific competence than most 1st graders’.

Climate Depot’s Round up of Eco-Wacko ‘Science’ Czar John Holdren claims here.

See Holdren’s congressional testimony here in which he tried to defend his prediction of the deaths of 1 billion by 2020.



Jan 29, 2011
UN Sec. Gen. - Capitalism is “Environmental Suicide” Says “We Need a Revolution”

Source: haunting the library

UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon has launched an astonishing attack on the current economic system of Western-style capitalsim, saying that it was dangerous and outdated in the light of global warming, and calling for a new economic paradigm.

Recent reports have noted that Ban-Ki Moon has said he will take a hands-off approach to global warming, and many have interpreted this to mean that he will leave it to the scientists and national Governments to decide.

But his latest comments, reported in The Guardian, make it clear that instead Ban-Ki Moon is switching from a narrow focus on global warming to a much wider spectrum attack on the current Western style of capitalism generally, on the grounds that it is not environmentally sustainable. The Guardian reports:

The world’s current economic model is an environmental “global suicide pact” that will result in disaster if it isn’t reformed, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, warned today.

Ban said that political and business leaders need to embrace economic innovation in order to save the planet.

“We need a revolution,” he told a panel at the World Economic Forum inDavos, Switzerland, on how best to make the global economy sustainable. “Climate change is also showing us that the old model is more than obsolete.”

He called the current economic model a recipe for “national disaster” and said: “We are running out of time. Time to tackle climate change, time to ensure sustainable...growth.” The Guardian revealed yesterday that Ban is ending his hands-on efforts to reach a global climate deal through UN negotiations, and move to focus on a broader sustainability agenda.

Guardian. Ban-Ki Moon: World’s Economic Model is ‘Environmental Suicide’

The Indonesian President condemned suggestions that his nation and other under-developed countries should stop developing and stay where they are to help protect the environment. Bill Gates, a father of three children, defended this, and suggested that limiting the number of children would be a better way to limit carbon emissions:

This view was partly shared by Gates, who said that “you cannot have a just world by telling people to use less energy than the average European”. One way to cap the world’s consumption and carbon emissions would be to invest in family planning said Gates, who has invested much of his fortune in health projects in the developing world.

The panel at which Ban-Ki Moon made his attack on capitalism was chaired by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times who said he hoped that by next year he would start to see some action on what was being discussed.

Read more here.



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