From: Ross Hays
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 10:35 AM
To: steig@ess.washington.edu
Subject: New data show much of Antarctica is warming

Eric,

Let me first say that this is my own opinion and does not represent the agency I work for. I feel your study is absolutely wrong. There are very few stations in Antarctica to begin with and only a hand full with 50 years of data. Satellite data is just approaching thirty years of available information.  In my experience as a day to day forecaster that has to travel and do field work in Antarctica the summer seasons have been getting colder. In the late 1980s helicopters were used to take our personnel to Williams Field from McMurdo Station due to the annual receding of the Ross Ice Shelf, but in the past few years the thaw has been limited and vehicles can continue to make the transition and drive on the ice.

One climate note to pass along is December 2006 was the coldest December ever for McMurdo Station. In a synoptic perspective the cooler sea surface temperatures have kept the maritime storms farther offshore in the summer season and the colder more dense air has rolled from the South Pole to the ice shelf.

There was a paper presented at the AMS Conference in New Orleans last year noting over 70% of the continent was cooling due to the ozone hole. We launch balloons into the stratosphere and the anticyclone that develops over the South Pole has been displaced and slow to establish itself over the past five seasons. The pattern in the troposphere has reflected this trend with more maritime (warmer) air around the Antarctic Peninsula which is also where most of the automated weather stations are located for West Antarctica which will give you the average warmer readings and skew the data for all of West Antarctica.

With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.

Sincerely,

Ross Hays

Icecap Note: Ross shown here with Antarctica’s Mount Erebus volcano in the background was a CNN forecast Meteorologist (a student of mine when I was a professor) who has spent numerous years with boots on the ground working for NASA in Antarctica, not sitting at a computer in an ivory tower in Pennsylvania or Washington State.

I was in the room in The Hague in November 2000 when then-French President Jacques Chirac hailed the Kyoto Protocol, or “global warming” treaty, as “the first component of an authentic global governance.” Then-European Union Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom seconded the sentiment when she told London’s Independent that Kyoto was “not about whether scientists agree” but instead “about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide.”

In truth, and as Europe is proving, its rhetorical bluster notwithstanding, no free society would do to itself what the Kyoto agenda requires. Hence the increased claims that this issue “is too important to be left to democracy.” Once a group of our betters is empowered to determine our energy - and therefore economic, sovereignty and national security - concerns, this crowd get its way.

Kyoto, of course, was negotiated while Carol M. Browner led the Environmental Protection Agency - and with her participation despite unanimous Senate instruction against doing so. Her position with Socialist International reminds us precisely why a radical like Mrs. Browner has had a position created for her, so as to avoid disclosure and Senate scrutiny, to lord over actual, Senate-confirmed Cabinet officials. Taxpayer representatives should not approve funds for such a position unless and until they receive an honest accounting of the agenda and its champions’ activities.

By Chris Horner, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington

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Remember the upcoming Heartland Conference in New York City, March 8-10, 2009

CE Question: Have we put too much faith in the peer review system? And should we seek sources outside the usual scientific circles?

Pielke Jr. Answer: Peer review is simply a cursory check on the plausibility of a study. It is not a rigorous replication and it is certainly not a stamp of correctness of results. Many studies get far more rigorous peer review on blogs after publication than in journals. I use our own blog for the purpose of getting good review before publication for some of my work now, because the review on blogs is often far better and more rigorous than from journals. This is not an indictment of peer review or journals, just an open-eyed recognition of the realities.It is hard to say who is outside and who is inside scientific circles anymore.  McIntyre now publishes regularly in the peer reviewed literature. [Pielke is speaking of Steve McIntyre, whom I would describe as a climate change gadfly; he publishes a blog called “Climate Audit"] Gavin Schmidt blogs and participates in political debates. [Schmidt is a NASA earth scientist who conducts climate research.] Lucia Liljegren works at Argonne National Lab as an expert in fluid dynamics and blogs quite well on climate predictions for fun. She is preparing a paper for publication based on her work, but she has never done climate work before. I am a political scientist who publishes in the Journal of Climate and Nature Geoscience and blogs. Who is to say who is ‘outside’ and who is ‘inside’? Is participation in IPCC the union card? How about having a PhD? Publishing in the literature? Testifying before Congress?

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Also now available some items that will gore your alarmists friends:

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Remember the upcoming Heartland Conference in New York City, March 8-10, 2009

Zoo’s winter warmers help chilly animals Animals at a zoo in China are huddling next a fire and electric heaters to beat the cold weather.  As Britain contends with its own big freeze, China is also suffering a blast of Arctic conditions and staff at Chongqing Wild Zoo have installed winter warmers to help the animals cope. Giraffes spend all day grouped around a roaring fire, while an enormous boa constrictor has been given a blanket and a heater to stave off the cold. Chongqing Wild Zoo occupies more than 150 acres of land and has more than 230 species of rare wild animals on display. Last year, it hit the headlines when keeper Luo Yong revealed he was teaching a troupe of wolves to howl along with music. He claimed all 30 wolves at the zoo had learned to howl along to his guitar playing - and hoped to start teaching them to dance next. Read more here. Maybe he can teach the alarmists to sing and dance for when the rapidly cooling world realizes they have been hoodwinked and they lose their jobs. More cold stories in the news follow:

London colder than Antarctica yesterday as temperatures in southern England were forecast to plunge as low as 14F (-10C) overnight.

German story calls this the coldest winter weather in 100 years.

Too cold for the penguins in the Netherlands.

For the first time since 1996 (La Nina year) the Dutch are using an ice-breaker ship in the Rotterdam harbor, the most important in Europe.

The cold weather also allowed the Dutch to participate in a national skating marathon for the first time since 1996 on the Oostervaardseplassen fresh water tidal area, near Amsterdam.  See this gallery of Dutch skaters here and here.

See this story on the Deadly Chills in Europe.

Thanks to Anthony Watts for finding this image.

See also this story about the coldest night in 22 years in Germany. Or some areas coldest in 100 years!

And how’s this for odd? Minnesota sled dog race canceled because of too much snow.

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Those carbon offsets seem to be quite popular these days. So why not expand the concept to other forms of pollution, right? Hmm…

See larger video here.

Also now available some items that will gore your alarmists friends:

See full size display here.

Leo Elshof from Arcadia University in Canada has written to me asking that I put a comedy disclaimer on the Skeptics Handbook, and otherwise threatens to ridicule me at international conferences and set the media onto me. The email is here and here is my reply. What have our universities sunk to?

Here also is my reply to Deltoid’s Tim Lambert to my posting about the lack of the model predicted hotspot fingerprint post and The Skeptics Handbook.

Finally even the big name global warming gurus admit the hot spot is missing here.

Icecap Note: Alarmists are now the true ‘denialists’ on the defensive, busy intimidating skeptics as their hoax falls apart in front of their unbelieving eyes. See also the desmogblog’s feeble, pathetic attack on the EPW’s 650 skeptics list here. Probably all the heavy snow and cold in western canada has them especially grumpy these days. With the PDO now negative, they can expect more “bah humbug” Christmas’s to come. They love attacking real scientists for their alleged big oil or tobacco connections that are not real but are actually themselves flush with money thanks to a donation from a convicted Canadian felon and from the directors role as chair of the David Suzuki Foundation (extremist environmentalist who called for the jailing of Canadian politicians who don’t agree with his radical agenda) and as public relations work for other alternative energy companies. That of course does not affect their objectivity. 

As to why the world seems so gullible to accept scams like anthropogenic global warming and the financial and housing market bubbles see this Wall Street Journal story.

If I had the power, there are any number of people from whom or about whom I would not want to hear, see, or read anything in 2009. Here’s a short list!

Al Gore. This pusillanimous fraud, a leftover from the Clinton administration who was defeated for president in 2000, has devoted his time to issuing warnings against global warming, the greatest hoax of the modern era. He tends to be most vocal during blizzards.

Dr. James Hansen. Right behind, with his nose deeply buried in Al Gore’s posterior, is the man who started the global warming hoax when, in the 1980s, he testified to Congress that the whole world is doomed. To his name I add the hundreds of other alarmists.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is quite possibly the most stupid person to have ever held that post.

Barney Frank. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this House of Representatives’ Elmer Fudd impersonator to take responsibility for the nation’s financial crisis. He spent the last few years defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while both purchased billions in sub-prime mortgage loans.

George W. Bush. I have had to listen to President Bush for eight years and that is quite enough.

John McCain. America has voted, but less than half for you and most of them held their nose when they did.

Keith Olbermann & Chris Matthews. These two alleged political pundits so thoroughly embarrassed themselves and MSNBC during the campaigns that their co-workers refuse to sit at their table in the company cafeteria.

Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson. The next President of the United States of America is an Afro-American. Millions of white people voted for him. Now go away.

Mahmoud Amadinejad. This loony is convinced that millions must die so that a mythical Twelfth Imam can return to bring Islam to all mankind. Meanwhile, Mahmoud and the ayatollahs have been busy destroying Iran when not taking hostages.

Hugo Chavez. This Fidel Castro wannabe has managed to destroy Venezuela’s economy with his communist ranting. I miss the good old days when the CIA was encouraged to rid us of such pests.

The United Nations. Anything that comes out of this institution should be treated like toxic waste.

So many annoying, deranged, and stupid people; we can be assured that the mainstream media will hang on their every word. Read more here.

"The skeptics are doing a good job because they are making us present ironclad proof,” said Lawrence E. Buja, a climate change researcher for the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. But since that battle is over, he said scientists need to move on and look at the detailed impact of climate change. “That’s a much harder question,” he said.” See this sad story here.  Icecap Response: Reminds me of the old commercial asking Where’s the Beef.  Where is this ironclad proof being provided? Just papers talking about the impacts should the theory be correct, each more ludicrous than the prior. The 2006 model made IPCC forecasts are failing just 2 years after their release. How can we expect them to be relied on 50 to 100 years from now.

Buja would have his eyes opened as to how much he doesn’t know about climate if he attended the Heartland’s ICCC in New York City March 8-10, 2009 where up to 1000 attendees including many of the world’s foremost climate experts from most every country of the world will convene to discuss the climate in an open environment conducive for free thought and the exchange of ideas. See much more about that conference here. If you can afford the trip, it will be trip you will never forget.  Donors to Icecap will qualify for a drawing for free admission.