By Joseph D’Aleo
It is behavior consistent with what you should expect as outlined in Leon Festinger’s ‘When Prophecies Fail’. First after the cessation of warming for 16 years and cooling for 10 and the slowing of sea level rises proved to be persistent, they switched to hyping extremes. Roger Pielke Jr in the EPW hearing pretty much disabused the congress of that idea by presenting the facts that showed there were no trends in any of these although don’t expect the media to get it. You see extremes gets eyeballs and sells newspapers (or used to).
So they have moved onto the Trenberth’s ‘Where’s Waldo’ idea that the heat somehow is hiding in the deep oceans and if nothing else this threatens sea life and coral and fisheries and will eventually reemerge to destroy life as we know it. But the oceans have shown no trend down to 300m in the tropical Pacific which the theory says should be warming most significantly.
Trenberth continues to embarrass himself and the science with claims like “Global warming is continuing but it’s being manifested in somewhat different ways.” (like cooling and more snow - makes perfect sense). But depending on where you are, the media is starting to regard global warming as a joke. Even here in the US, some writers are paying attention - even at the Washington Post where Ed Rogers wrote:
Two things are happening that undermine President Obama and the Democrats’ attempts to control our lives via climate change policy. First, according to a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll, fewer and fewer Americans say global warming is a serious problem. Only 33 percent of Americans now say global warming is a serious problem, compared to 39 percent six months ago.
And second, the globe is not getting warmer or at least, it hasn’t in the last 15 years. As the March 30 print edition of The Economist reported, “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar.”
Much of this resulted from the winters in the northern and southern hemisphere which instead of disappearing became as bad as they have seen in decades even centuries. What to do? First they proclaimed with the first winter or two that that was weather not climate. That argument was made fun of in the media along with the UKMO forecasts which were biased by their belief in the AGW theory and consistently too warm for the last decade. So along came little Jennifer Francis of Rutgers who happened to notice that warm water in the North Atlantic (around the Barents and Kara Sea) entered the arctic and led to melting of ice and subsequent warming a few years later. This of course has ben used by yours truly and other meteorologists and written on by Polyakov of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska. See the University of Alaska Fairbanks IARC analysis here
The National Snow and Ice Data Center, before it was taken over by extremists in the record-setting (since satellite monitoring began in 1979) summer melt season of 2007, noted the importance of both oceans in the arctic ice.
“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.”
See my story that shows this is the case.
She then theorized that this lack of arctic ice caused a polar amplification of the jet stream causing large waves instead of a more gentle, more zonal east west flow that bring warmer ocean are inland into North America, Europe. This amplification is what delivers the cold and snow to Eurasia and North America. This was of course jumped on by Jeff Masters now part of the new NBC Universal embarrassment conglomerate called the Weather Company that now even is affiliated with the lefty warmists from Climate Central like Heidi Cullen who embarrassed herself in front of the EPW this week. They fail to explain why if the ice returned to normal in October why we had the record snows and cold in the late winter well into the spring from late February to May in both the US and Europe.
But the story now shift to the southern hemisphere where a major cold wave and snow event lasting a week is afflicting South America. You see the same amplified pattern we saw in the Northern Hemisphere is occurring down under.
The snow has been falling in Argentina and Uruguay and soon will begin in Brazil. These places have seen snow in recent years, a throwback to the 1960s in much the same way as the cold and snow in the Northern Hemisphere has resembled the snowy 1960s.
Uruguay, July 2013
Brazil, 1965
If the polar amplification theory were to hold then the antarctic must be melting right? Rignot (another warmist wingnut) said days ago the antarctic ice cap is breaking up. The data shows we are nearly 2 STD positive and nearing the new record.
Sorry guys, it doesn’t fly. Try the sun, which years ago, I was told by Hurd ‘Doc’ Willett led to periods of great amplification and persistence like we are seeing (near solar minima).
Indeed Hansen’s own modeler, Drew Shindell has shown the low solar (low UV) Maunder minimum led to widespread cold but Atlantic blocking in the models that included ozone and UV.
But should they agree with the Russian scientists that we are heading into a Maunder and it will have a significant impact, its all over for the movement. But if Festinger is right, look for them to find another excuse like particulates from China coal plants, just like the cults awaiting the spaceship to take them away say they must have miscalculated on the date and time and will find another day to meet. When they fail, they are forgotten. Remember the hype about the catastrophic solar event in 2012? The Millennium bug that cost trillions? Will we look back on the AGW movement that almost destroyed Europe’s economy and threatens the US and think of the 1980s to 2000s as the good old days with the climate optimum we should of enjoyed instead of wasting trillions to end?