By Arno Arrak

On 16th December 2010 Nature had a hopeful cover story: “STAYING ALIVE: Cut greenhouse-gas emissions now and we can still save the polar bear.”

Unfortunately it is false hope based upon a misunderstanding of Arctic warming. This cover story relies upon a paper by Amstrup et al.1 that is inside. They remind us in the beginning of their paper that “...based on projected losses of their essential sea-ice habitats, a United States Geological Survey research team concluded in 2007 that two-thirds of the worlds’s polar bears (Ursus maritimus) could disappear by mid-century...”

But then they tell us that all is not lost because the USGS study left out an important factor, namely the possible benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation. By extensive modeling work they then demonstrate that greenhouse gas mitigation could improve the survival of U. maritimus well into the next century. Actually, both USGS and Amstrup use modeling to predict Arctic temperature from the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Arctic temperature in turn is what determines ice conditions in the Arctic that are important to survival of U. maritimus. The model results from Amstrup et al. show that “...when greenhouse gas mitigation was combined with best on-the-ground management practices (for example, controlling hunting and other interactions with humans) extinction was not the most probable outcome in any ecoregion, and future population sizes...could be equivalent to or even larger than at present...”

But all that is conditional upon the reality of what their models predict about arctic warming. Lets take a look at what we know about this reality. The arctic warming itself started more than a hundred years ago as Kaufman et al.2 have shown. They published a two thousand year long history of arctic temperature that illuminates the pre-history of current warming, essential for understanding the Arctic of today. What they found was a slow, linear cooling trend, probably due to earth orbital variations, for most of this period. But at the turn of the twentieth century everything changed: the temperature curve suddenly turned up like a hockey stick and kept on going up. It paused for a while in mid-century, resumed its climb between 1960 and 1975, and is still going strong. This two-part warming has also been observed by others. Thus Ian Plimer3 reports two noticeable periods of warming, the first from 1920 to 1930 and the second from 1975 to 2000. According to Plimer, many parts of the Arctic were closed to ships, even to icebreakers, prior to the 1930s. By contrast, in the thirties the North Sea route, around Spitsbergen, had opened up.

The Arctic was then warmer than in recent years and ships that were not icebreakers could reach past Spitsbergen to the Russian arctic ports and circumnavigate Franz Joseph Land which is half way between Siberia and the pole. And this route stayed open through World War II when U.S. ships were able to deliver lend-lease supplies to Russian arctic ports. Bengtsson et al.4 likewise report an early century warming trend that was followed by cooling from 1940 to 1960. According to them the present warming did not reach the level of the forties until 2003. We are past that today and in unknown territory.

Let’s now go back to Kaufman et al. who discovered the sudden start of arctic warming in the first place: “An Arctic summer temperature of -5 degrees Celsius...might have been expected by mid-twentieth century...instead our reconstruction indicates that temperatures increased to +0.2 degrees Celsius by 1950. This shift correlates with the rise in global average temperature which coincided with the onset of global anthropogenic changes in global atmospheric composition...” And again: “...warming in the Arctic was enhanced relative to global average, likely reflecting a combination of natural variability and positive feedbacks that amplified the radiative forcing.”

A wonderful concatenation of global warming mantras, all wrong. What this tells us is that they were too lazy to think it through and substituted dogma for analysis. First, temperature curves from NOAA and the Hadley Centre (HadCRUT3) both show that the start of the twentieth century was followed by a ten year cooling trend, not by any rise of global average temperature which came later. Bengtsson et al. also note that anthropogenic forcing in the early part of the century was unlikely since the greenhouse gas forcings at the time amounted to only twenty percent of those in the present day. And Trenberth et al. show that carbon dioxide took no notice of the arrival of a new century. This fact alone tells us that it is quite impossible for carbon dioxide to have had anything to do with that warming: the laws of physics simply don’t allow it.

The absorptivity of carbon dioxide in the infrared is a physical property of that gas and it cannot be changed. If you want more absorption so as to create a warming you must put more gas into the atmosphere and we know this did not happen.

Figure 1. SAT Anomalies from 1900 - 2008, 60-90 degrees North latitude

Which leaves ocean currents as the only possible source of delivering warmth to the Arctic. This hypothesis requires that a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the twentieth century and not some greenhouse effect is the true cause of arctic warming. And behavior of ocean currents is not anything the models used by both USGS and by Amstrup can handle which makes both of these modeling efforts useless. History of arctic warming is also recorded by SAT anomaly data from 60-90 degrees north latitude (Figure 1). These data are available from CRU, and have a better time resolution than Kaufman et al. original observations do. They show that the twentieth century arctic temperature history breaks down into three linear segments: the original warming from start of the century to approximately 1940; a cooling from 1940 to 1970; and a warming again up to the present.

What next? These segments are each about thirty to forty years long and if this is an oscillation we should expect cooling because the last warm stretch is already quite long. Many so-called “oscillations” in the ocean are identified on much less observational data than this. If we do get a cooling sometime soon then it is possible that there exists an oscillation involving or related to ocean currents. And if that is really the case it has to involve the thermohaline circulation in some way because of the long cycle length involved.

But the fact that there was a definite beginning to warming speaks against the oscillation idea which must remain a speculation for now. We really don’t know what made the currents change originally and we don’t know why there was a pause and reversal in midcentury. And another thing we don’t know is whether the Meridional Overturning Circulation belongs into this picture in some way or not. This is where much more climate study is needed. That midcentury cooling may have been just a hiccup but should another cooling come along I might welcome it as relief for polar bears. Mitigation by gas reduction will not help them. All we can do for them now is to make sure that “hunting and other human interactions” that Amstrup et al. speak of don’t make their situation worse. See post here.

By Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Niger Innis

President Obama recently called Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, to thank him for hiring MVP-candidate Michael Vick, and underscore the President’s support for giving rehabilitated ex-convicts a second chance.

We strongly support both sentiments, and think it is wonderful that a God-gifted athlete like Vick can again market his formidable talents. Our church has an active, successful rehabilitation programs for men and women who “did their time” and want to become productive members of society.

However, the main purpose of the call to Lurie had nothing to do with rehabilitation. It was to push the President’s Green Agenda. Mr. Obama urged Lurie to make Lincoln Financial Field “greener,” by installing wind turbines and solar panels; he also discussed the construction of a biodiesel plant nearby. 

Mr. Obama has frequently said the economy will be his “singular focus” over the next two years. “We need to work every day, to get our economy moving again. For most Americans and for me, that means jobs.” He wanted Mr. Lurie to support that agenda.

However, when Mr. Obama says, “create jobs” and “grow the economy,” he means taxpayer-supported “green” jobs and a “renewable” energy economy. This may be politically correct and appeal to some voters, but his plan will cause major trauma to our economic recovery. While Obama’s agenda means subsidizing wind, solar and biofuel power, it also means handcuffing hydrocarbon production and use. The inevitable result will be increased energy prices and obstacles to investment in traditional sectors of our economy.

Mr. Obama’s climate and energy czars, EPA administrator and Interior secretary are imposing policies this very week that will make this untenable result a reality. They will make more energy resources off limits, reduce royalty and tax revenues - and implement by executive fiat the draconian carbon dioxide and pollution controls that Congress and the American people rejected in 2010. The people rejected the plan because the controls would further curtail economic growth, and endanger environmental quality and human health and welfare.

For both ex-cons and citizens who have never been inside a jail cell, those policies will mean higher prices, higher taxes, fewer opportunities, hobbled civil rights progress, and a still moribund economy. They may create more jobs for government bureaucrats, but will cost millions of jobs in other sectors. These policies will be especially devastating for ex-cons seeking entry-level work.

Low-cost electricity and transportation fuels are key to improving productivity and giving American companies a competitive edge internationally, while paying the world’s best wages and benefits. Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable impair productivity and profitability, freeze hiring, and destroy or outsource jobs. They adversely affect factories, truckers, airlines, homes, offices, schools, hospitals, ambulances, taxi and delivery services - virtually 100 percent of our lives.

These “job creation” and “economy building” policies may make sense in the rarified atmosphere of Planet White House. They make no sense in the “real” world the rest of us must continue to live in.

Michael Vick may be blessed with God given talent enhanced through his hard work. Most ex-cons, however, are not as fortunate. These rehabilitated individuals need a booming American economy that provides for a variety of job opportunities - not a crippled American economy handicapped by fatally flawed energy policies.

Reliable, affordable energy is the foundation for jobs, health, environmental and civil rights progress, and every other component of human welfare. These misnamed “green energy” policies severely undermine every one of these goals.

Congress, the states, truly responsible companies and the courts need to stop, defund or overturn this White House, EPA and Interior power grab. The Affordable Power Alliance will do everything it can to ensure that this happens. PDF

Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Niger Innis are co-chairs of the Affordable Power Alliance, a humanitarian coalition of civil rights, minority, small business, senior citizen and faith-based organizations that champion access to affordable energy. In their next APA article, Alliance experts will give more specifics as to why many of the green policies have inherent problems that will affect every American’s pocketbook.

By Christopher Booker

First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials.

The Russian icebreaker Krasin is sailing to the relief of fishermen trapped in the Sea of Okhotsk

Let us begin with last week’s astonishing claim that, far from failing to predict the coldest November and December since records began, the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office in October that Britain was facing an early and extremely cold winter. In what looked like a concerted effort at damage limitation, this was revealed by the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Roger Harrabin, a leading evangelist for man-made climate change. But the Met Office website - as reported by the blog Autonomous Mind - still contains a chart it published in October, predicting that UK temperatures between December and February would be up to 2C warmer than average.

So if the Met Office told the Government in October the opposite of what it told the public, it seems to be admitting that its information was false and misleading. But we have no evidence of what it did tell the Government other than its own latest account. And on the model of the famous Cretan Paradox, how can we now trust that statement?

Then we have the recent claim by the Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, in an interview with Nature, that if her organisation’s forecasts have shortcomings, they could be remedied by giving it another 20 million pounds a year for better computers. As she put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”

Yet it is only two years since the Met Office was boasting of the 33 million pounds supercomputer, the most powerful in Britain, that it had installed in Exeter. This, as Prof Slingo confirmed to the parliamentary inquiry into Climategate, is what provides the Met Office both with its weather forecasting and its projections of what the world’s climate will be like in 100 years (relied on, in turn, by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Prof Slingo fails to recognise that the fatal flaw of her computer models is that they assume that the main forcing factor determining climate is the rise in CO2 levels. So giving her yet more money would only compound the errors her computers come up with.

In another interview, just before Christmas, when the whole country was grinding to a halt in ice and snow, Prof Slingo claimed that this was merely a local event, “very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”. Do these Met Office experts ever look beyond those computer models which tell them that 2010 was the second hottest year in history? Only a few days after she made this remark, the east coast of the USA suffered one of the worst snowstorms ever recorded. There have been similar freezing disasters in south China, Japan, central Russia and right round the northern hemisphere. See more here.

The only evidence the Met Office and its warmist allies can adduce to support their belief in the warmth of 2010 is that in certain parts of the world, such as Greenland, Baffin Island and the southern half of Hudson Bay, it was warmer than average. Yet even there temperatures are currently plummeting: Hudson Bay and Baffin Island are rapidly freezing, at well below zero.

The desperate attempt to establish 2010 as an outstandingly warm year also relies on increasingly questionable official data records, such as that run by Dr James Hansen, partly based on large areas of the world which have no weather stations (more than 60 per cent of these have been lost since 1990). The gaps are filled in by the guesswork of computer models, designed by people who have an interest in showing that the Earth is continuing to warm.

It is this kind of increasingly suspect modelling that the Met Office depends on for its forecasts and the IPCC for its projections of climate a century ahead. And from them our politicians get their obsession with global warming, on which they base their schemes to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on a suicidal energy policy, centred on building tens of thousands of grotesquely expensive and useless windmills.

A vivid little reflection of how our whole official system has gone off the rails was the award in the New Year’s Honours List of a CBE, one rank lower than a knighthood, to Robert Napier, the climate activist and former head of the global warming pressure group WWF-UK, who is now the Met Office’s chairman. The more the once-respected Met Office gets lost in the greenie bubble into which it has been hijacked, the worse it becomes at doing the job for which we pay it nearly 200 million pounds a year, and the more our Government showers it with cash and honours.

Meanwhile, in the real world, another weather-related disaster is unfolding in the Sea of Okhotsk, off the coast of Russia north of Japan, where the BBC last week reported that a group of Russian “fishing trawlers” had got stuck in “30 centimetres” (a foot) of ice. It didn’t sound anything too serious. But, as my colleague Richard North has been reporting on his EU Referendum blog, the BBC underestimated the scale of what is happening by several orders of magnitude.

Although several smaller ships have now escaped, the two largest are still trapped in up to six feet (two metres) of ice - including one of the world’s biggest factory ships, the 32,000-ton Sodruzhestvo. They still have more than 400 men on board. Three Russian ice-breakers, including two huge 14,000-tonners, are engaged in what looks like a forlorn bid to free them. A 14,000-ton ice-breaker can scarcely clear the way for a ship well over twice its size. And as the weather worsens, with gales, blizzards and visibility often reduced to zero, the chances of helicoptering the men to safety seem sadly remote.

The mystery is why the Russians should, in the middle of winter, have allowed such a fleet of ships into a stretch of sea known as “the factory of ice”. This is because all the rivers which empty into it from the Russian coast lower its salinity, making it prone to rapid freezing. But the Sea of Okhotsk has long been held out by the world’s warmists as an example, like the Arctic, of waters which, thanks to global warming, will soon be ice-free.

As we know from Prof Slingo, however, all this cold weather we are having at the moment is a local event, “very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”. Perhaps the Russian fishing fleet took the word of the Met Office, assuming that ice was a thing of the past. As the ice-breakers struggle to reach the hundreds of trapped men, and still-thickening ice threatens to start crushing the hulls of their ships, it seems that, short of a miracle like that which saved the Chilean miners, a major tragedy could be unfolding.

Meanwhile, the sad little nonentities in charge of our Met Office prattle on, extending their begging bowls - and our politicians who have put them there remain smugly and inanely oblivious to anything happening out there in the real world.

Read reprint on SPPI here.

And Andrew Orlowski in the register writes Met confirms secret Gov forecast of Brass Monkey winter.  He recalls “In October 2008, the Met predicted “a milder than average” winter, only for Britain to experience its coldest in 10 years. The following year, the Met predicted that “the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue” - only for Britain to experience the coldest winter in 30 years. This winter has proved the coldest since records begin. Transport Minister Phil Hammond told Parliament he’ll ask the Met if three cold winters in a row indicates a “steep change” in British climate. The Met Office responded it needed more money for bigger computers, likely to produce bad forecasts but with much more local detail to the errors. They are like a contractor who botches a home improvement project but tells you if you give him a lot more money he will do better the next effort.
H/T GWPF