Sydney Morning Herald reporting on UK Telegraph story from the comics section

THE world is unequivocally getting hotter and has been for more than 30 years, according to the most comprehensive study of temperature readings from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean.

The report, compiled by the British Met Office and its US equivalent, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), provides the “greatest evidence we have ever had” to support global warming, its researchers say.

They forecast that this year will be the hottest on record, globally. Usually scientists rely on the temperature over land, taken from weather stations, to gauge whether the climate is changing.

However, today’s State of the Climate report brings together data from 10 separate indicators stretching back 150 years, including measurements of sea level rise taken from ships, the temperature of the upper atmosphere taken from weather balloons and field surveys of melting glaciers.

New technology also means it is possible to measure the temperature of the oceans, which absorb 90 per cent of the world’s heat.

Seven of the 10 areas measured including air and sea surface temperatures, the amount of heat in the ocean and humidity, had rising figures. Three areas, the extent of Arctic sea ice, glaciers and winter snow cover in the northern hemisphere, were in decline.

ICECAP COMMENT: Biggest bunch of BS going - air (Phil Jones admits to a cooling of 0.12C/decade from 2002 to 2009) and sea temperatures and ocean heat content have been steady or declining.

Antarctic ice came close to an all time record and arctic ice continues its bounce back from 2007. Look at the top ten snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters below (graph enlarged here) - 3 of the top 5 have been this last decade (with last year number 2).

Here is the year to year winter snowcover. The trend since 1966 is exactly 0.0. NOAA????

(graph enlarged here)

According to the researchers, the study shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.

And despite the cold winter in Europe and north-east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record.

The NOAA has stated that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record, while the Met Office believes it is the second hottest start to the year after 1998.

Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office, said “greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation” for the 1F (0.56C) rise in average global temperatures over the past 50 years.

“Despite the fact people say global warming has stopped, the new data, added on to existing data, gives us the greatest evidence we have ever had,” he said.

Climate change sceptics have questioned global warming in the wake of the “climategate” scandal. It was claimed that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia show scientists were willing to manipulate the land surface temperatures to show global warming. The scientists were cleared in an independent inquiry.

But Dr Stott said that sceptics could no longer question land surface temperature as other records also prove global warming.

He said each indicator takes independent evidence from at least three different institutions. Despite variations from year to year, each decade has been warmer than the last since the 1980s.

He said: “When we follow independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”

Icecap Note: More to come. The alarmists are fighting back with one bogus study after another - relying on the same corrupted station data and cherry picked select other data. Make it all sound very official like the IPCC did. Their day will come....soon.

According to the researchers, the study shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.

And despite the cold winter in Europe and north-east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record.

The NOAA has stated that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record, while the Met Office believes it is the second hottest start to the year after 1998.

Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office, said “greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation” for the 1F (0.56C) rise in average global temperatures over the past 50 years.

“Despite the fact people say global warming has stopped, the new data, added on to existing data, gives us the greatest evidence we have ever had,” he said.

Climate change sceptics have questioned global warming in the wake of the “climategate” scandal. It was claimed that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia show scientists were willing to manipulate the land surface temperatures to show global warming. The scientists were cleared in an independent inquiry.

But Dr Stott said that sceptics could no longer question land surface temperature as other records also prove global warming.

He said each indicator takes independent evidence from at least three different institutions. Despite variations from year to year, each decade has been warmer than the last since the 1980s.

He said: “When we follow independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”

Icecap Note: The alarmists are fighting back with one bogus study after another - relying on the same corrupted station data and cherry picked select other data. Make it all sound very official like the IPCC did. Their day will come....soon.

By Roger Pielke Jr.

A new paper is out in a journal getting a reputation for silly science that predicts that climate change will lead to a massive influx of Mexicans across the border to the United States. Here is how the LA Times breathlessly opened its news story on the PNAS paper:

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

A reporter emailed me an embargoed copy last week asking for my reactions. Here is how I responded (and I pulled no punches):

To be blunt, the paper is guesswork piled on top of “what ifs” built on a foundation of tenuous assumptions. The authors seem to want to have things both ways—they readily acknowledge the many and important limitations of their study, but then go on to assert that “it is nevertheless instructive to predict future migrant flows for Mexico using the estimates at hand to assess the possible magnitude of climate change-related emigration.” It can’t be both—if the paper has many important limitations, then this means that that it is not particularly instructive. With respect to predicting immigration in 2080 (!), admitting limitations is no serious flaw.

To use this paper as a prediction of anything would be a mistake. It is a tentative sensitivity study of the effects of one variable on another, where the relationship between the two is itself questionable but more importantly, dependent upon many other far more important factors. The authors admit this when they write, “It is important to note that our projections should be interpreted in a ceteris paribus manner, as many other factors besides climate could potentially influence migration from Mexico to the United States.” but then right after they assert, “Our projections are informative, nevertheless, in quantifying the potential magnitude of impacts of climate change on out-migration.” It is almost as if the paper is written to be misinterpreted.

Climate change is real and worthy of our attention. Putting forward research claims that cannot be supported by the underlying analysis will not help the credibility of the climate science community. Even with the voluminous caveats in the paper, to conclude that “climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15-65 y) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone” is just not credible. The paper reflects a common pattern in the climate impacts literature of trying to pin negative outcomes on climate change using overly simplistic methods and ignoring those factors other than climate which have far more effect.

One of the paper’s authors, Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and lead author of the forthcoming IPCC report on extremes explains his motivation with the paper:

Our primary objectives were, No. 1, to give policymakers something to think about and, No. 2, to give researchers a spur to start answering some of the more complicated questions

One of the climate impacts scholars whose work was relied on in the PNAS paper was critical:

Diana Liverman, a University of Arizona climate researcher, criticized the new study for basing its forecasts in part on research that she worked on in the early 1990s that looked at crop yields in only two central Mexico sites.

In reply, Oppenheimer said the Princeton study found similar results in a second crop-yield study, and the crop reductions predicted for Mexico are typical of what has been predicted for other countries in that latitude.

Liverman said that while she believes climate change could cause widespread migration, she has seen no study documenting it. Having studied the problems of Mexican farmers for two decades, she said she has found that a bad economy, the government’s withdrawal of agricultural subsidies and the North American Free Trade Agreement have caused problems far greater than climate change.

Nature also has a set of critical reactions. The LA Times article recovered from its breathless opening with a well-buried lede:

Philip Martin, an expert in agricultural economics at UC Davis, said that he hadn’t read the study but that making estimates based solely on climate change was virtually impossible.

“It is just awfully hard to separate climate change from the many, many other factors that affect people’s decisions whether to stay in agriculture or move,” he said.

In silly science however, nothing is impossible.  Read more here. H/t Marc Morano, Climate Depot.

By Marc Morano, Climate Depot

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement.

In a hard-hitting and exclusive new exclusive video just released by Climate Depot, Dr. Rancourt declares that the entire man-made global warming movement is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,” Rancourt, who has published peer-reviewed research, explained in a June 8, 2010 essay.

Watch Rancourt video here.

‘I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he asserted.

Rancourt’s dissent on man-made climate fears has not set well with many of his fellow green friends. “When I tell environmental activists that global warming is not something to be concerned about, they attack me—they shun me, they do not allow me to have my materials published in their magazines, editors,” Rancourt explained to Climate Depot.

Rancourt bluntly examines why his fellow environmentalists are wrapped up in promoting climate alarm. (Note: Rancourt also ridicules environmental concern over acid rain and the ozone hole. See below)

“They look for comfortable lies that they can settle into and alleviate the guilt they feel about being on privileged end of the planet—a kind of survivors guilt. A lot of these environmentalists are guilt laden individuals who need to alleviate the guilt without taking risks,” he said. “They are weekend activists...looking for lies to hitch onto.”

“The modern environmental move has hijacked itself by looking for an excuse to stay comfortable and stay away from actual battle. Ward Churchill has called this pacifism as pathology,” he explained. “If you are really concerned about saving world’s forests or habitat destruction, then fight against habitat destruction, don’t go off in tenuous thing about co2 concentration in the atmosphere. Actually address the question; otherwise you are weakening your effect as an activist.”

Rancourt openly expresses his hostility for former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“I felt I’ll walking out of the theatre. It’s terrible. It does not respect the intelligence the viewer. The film does not acknowledge people can think for themselves at all,” Rancourt said.

Rancourt lamented how “environmentalists could just gobble this up and agree with [Gore’s film] in a non critical fashion.”

Gore “strikes me as someone working for someone—as someone who will financially benefit from this. He does not give me impression of someone who genuinely cares about environmental or social justice.”

Rancourt spared no mercy for the embattled UN IPCC. The scientists are “named by governments, they are scientists who accept to serve a political role. Their mission is to write a report” that “is meant to be used by government. Their goal is find a conclusion...it is a political process.” [Editor’s Note: Climate Depot’s Executive Editor Marc Morano appeared on Dr. Denis Rancourt’s Radio Show for One Hour in May 2010: Morano: The global warming narrative...was total bunko, it was a con job...a scientific scandal of the highest order’]

Rancourt is also very critical of proposed global warming carbon trading or cap and trade.

“Someone is going to make a lot of money from these schemes. I have great distrust for it. It is not motivated by true concern for social justice and the environment. It can only be about powerful financiers. I see it as an horrendous scam,” Rancourt said, adding he “I completely agree” with UK environmental guru James Lovelock who called carbon trading “verging on a gigantic scam.”

But it is his fellow University professors that Rancourt has the least amount of patience with.

“They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals,” Rancourt said.

“You have this army of university scientists and they have to pretend like they are doing important research without ever criticizing the powerful interests in a real way. So what do they look for, they look for elusive sanitized things like acid rain, global warming,” he added. This entire process “helps to neutralize any kind of dissent,” according to Rancourt.

“When you do find something bad, you quickly learn and are told you better toe the line on this—your career depends on it,” Rancourt said.

Some Key Excerpts from Denis Rancourt:

Left-wing Env. Scientist & Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt: Some Big Lies of Science - June 2010

Rancourt Excerpt: Environmental scientists naively and knowingly work hand in hand with finance-corporate shysters, mainstream media, politicians, and state and international bureaucrats to mask real problems and to create profit opportunities for select power elites...I exposed the global warming cooptation scam in an essay that Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation called ‘one of the best essays on greenhouse myth-making from a left perspective.’ [...]

My essay prompted David F. Noble to research the question and write The Corporate Climate Coup to expose how the media embrace followed the finance sector’s realization of the unprecedented potential for revenues that going green could represent. [...] I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.”

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass.”

Rancourt Ridicules Ozone Hole Claims: ‘Do you know of anyone who has been killed by the ozone hole?’

Rancourt Mocks Acid Rain Claims: As a physicist and Earth scientist turned environmental scientist, I could not find an example of a demonstrated negative impact on lakes or forests from acid rain. In my opinion, contrary to the repeated claims of the scientist authors, the research on acid rain demonstrates that acid rain could not possibly have been the problem’ - I concluded it had been a fake problem. [...] Acid rain very, very similar to global warming. A Sanitized problem. What I found, researched from the 1950’s on and I concluded that is had been a fake problem. The effect on lake acidity from acid rain was so subtle so difficult to measure—virtually impossible to measure [hype about acid rain was] at a period when forests being destroyed by real things.

See more here.