Global Warming Update.

Great Lakes ice cover is earliest in 40 years.

Global Warming - Not

Instapundit quotes the Wall Street Journal:

//When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was “wrong, completely wrong,” and was “deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public.”

We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse’s article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998,” wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: “Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more.”

Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That’s according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.//

And notes:

//What’s funny is that I see stories by “science journalists” all the time attributing all sorts of new events to “climate change” even though the global warming pause is now widely acknowledged, without ever addressing the contradiction..//

It's that last part that resonates with me.

How can Global Warming be melting the poles and causing islands to submerge when scientists acknowledge that there hasn't been any Global Warming for two decades?

Turns out that the horror story of sinking island nations is pure bunk.

Are any of these stories true?

Island nations will not be swamped by rising ocean levels.

Mikarite Temari, the mayor of Christmas Island, Kiribati’s largest atoll, rolled his eyes and shook his head as I read off my laptop in his office what his president, Anote Tong, had said during a visit to New York.

“According to the science and the projections,” Tong, a slim 62-year-old with a trimmed mustache, a gray crew-cut and a talent for metaphor, told Fareed Zakaria on CNN, “it is already too late for us.” For Kiribati and other nations made up of low-lying atolls, Tong added, “The impact of climate change is about total annihilation.” An interviewer in The New Yorker wrote, “Kiribati’s fate is settled; Tong gives it twenty years.”

“This is not true,” Temari said with visible dismay. “None of it.” Scientists who analyze atoll island dynamics agree that any notion of existential threat for atoll nations is unfounded. Indeed, several studies have shown that the six inches the central Pacific has risen since 1950 has had no measurable effect on any island. The scientists say that the tropical white-sand islands languidly draped around aquamarine lagoons are actually sitting on live coral reefs that will grow as the Pacific rises two to four feet by the end of the century, as the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change predicts.

“The reefs will maintain equilibrium with sea-level rise,” said Scott Smithers of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. “Waves are what will allow them to keep their head above water.”

“During big storms, the waves wash over the beaches and deposit sand inland,” explained Paul Kench, head of the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, who like Smithers is a coastal geo-morphologist. “That’s how the islands rose above the reef thousands of years ago and that’s what they’ll keep on doing as long as their reefs produce sand.” Atoll sand is made of broken bits of coral and coralline algae and of the skeletons of mollusks and tiny creatures called foraminifera. Noting that ocean acidification and a warming ocean will be increasing their mortality, he added, “That’s not significant in geological time, because a reef can produce sand for centuries after it dies.”//

Global Warming...

...5% of CO2 is the problem?

//The IPCC estimates that, since the Industrial Revolution, humans have released 365 billion tons of carbon from burning fossil fuels. Annual emissions, including those from deforestation and cement production, are less than 9 billion tons. Yet natural carbon cycles involve annual exchanges of carbon between the atmosphere, the land, and the oceans many times greater than emissions from human activities. The IPCC estimates that 118.7 billion tons of carbon per year is emitted from land and 78.4 billion tons from oceans. Thus, the human contribution of 9 billion tons annually accounts for less than 5 percent of the total gross emissions. The AGW hypothesis, as well as all the climate-change policies that depend on it, assumes that the human 5 percent drives the overall change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere—and that the other 95 percent, comprising natural emissions, is counterbalanced by absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes. Summing it up, the IPCC declared in its fourth assessment report, in 2007: “The increase in atmospheric CO2 is known to be caused by human activities.”

Salby contends that the IPCC’s claim isn’t supported by observations. Scientists’ understanding of the complex climate dynamics is undeveloped, not least because the ocean’s heat capacity is a thousand times greater than that of the atmosphere and relevant physical observations of the oceans are so sparse. Until this is remedied, the science cannot be settled. In Salby’s view, the evidence actually suggests that the causality underlying AGW should be reversed. Rather than increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere triggering global temperatures to rise, rising global temperatures come first—and account for the great majority of changes in net emissions of CO2, with changes in soil-moisture conditions explaining most of the rest. Furthermore, these two factors also explain changes in net methane emission, the second-most important “human” greenhouse gas. As for what causes global temperatures to rise, Salby says that one of the most important factors influencing temperature is heat exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean.

Why is the IPCC so certain that the 5 percent human contribution is responsible for annual increases in carbon dioxide levels? Without examining other possible hypotheses, the IPCC argues that the proportion of heavy to light carbon atoms in the atmosphere has “changed in a way that can be attributed to addition of fossil fuel carbon”—with light carbon on the rise. Fossil fuels, of course, were formed from plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago; the IPCC reasons that, since plants tend to absorb more light carbon than heavy carbon, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels reduce the share of heavy carbon in the atmosphere. But Salby points to much larger natural processes, such as emissions from decaying vegetation, that also reduce the proportion of heavy carbon. Temperature heavily influences the rate of microbial activity inherent in these natural processes, and Salby notes that the share of heavy carbon emissions falls whenever temperatures are warm. Once again, temperature appears more likely to be the cause, rather than the effect, of observed atmospheric changes.//

Things are rough now...

....14 years after everyone died.

PBS : Climatologists Predict Global Warming Will Kill Us All By The Year 2000

Posted on June 21, 2014by stevengoddard

EARTH’S CLIMATIC CRISIS EXAMINED BY ‘NOVA’
By HERBERT MITGANG
Published: June 24, 1986

PICKING up where a high-school chemistry class might end, ”Nova,” the public-broadcasting science series, offers the nonmatriculating viewer an advanced course in worrying. The cause of the concern is all the carbon dioxide that’s being pumped into the industrialized and motorized air. The hourlong broadcast is called ”The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect,” at 9 tonight on Channel 13.

The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life – animal, plant, human – will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth’s mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.

Is there nothing that Global Warming can't do?

Arctic sea ice at 10 year high.

Global Warming...

...is there anything that it can't do.

This has to win the award for "Dumbest Global Warming Scare Story of 2014."

"Gingers face extinction due to climate change scientists warn."

The red hair gene could be on the way out as it is thought to be a response to cloudy weather in Scotland, something which the country could see less and less of.

A gene mutation that yields red hair and pale skin which is more sensitive to light leaves DNA in skill cells more prone to sun damage and cancer, and if predictions of rising temperatures are correct evolution might cause it to regress.

Dr Alistair Moffat, managing director of Galashiels-based ScotlandsDNA, said: "We think red hair in Scotland, Ireland and in the North of England is adaption to the climate.

"I think the reason for light skin and red hair is that we do not get enough sun and we have to get all the Vitamin D we can.

"If the climate is changing and it is to become more cloudy or less cloudy then this will affect the gene.

"If it was to get less cloudy and there was more sun, then yes, there would be fewer people carrying the gene."

Another scientist, who did not wish to be named due to the theoretical nature of the work, told ScotlandNow: "I think the regressive gene is slowly dying out.

"Climate change could see a decline in the number of people with red hair in Scotland.

"It would take many hundreds of years for this to happen.

"Red hair and blue eyes are not adapted to a warm climate.

"It is just a theory but the recessive gene may likely be lost. The recessive gene could be in danger."

Only 1-2% of the world's population have red hair, though in Scotland 13% of the population are ginger and 40% are thought to carry the gene.

Consider the lack of scientific understanding behind this story. Red hair is recessive. Even if everyone with red hair was struck dead by a less than 1% increase in world temperature over 150 years, red heads would still be born because non-red heads carry the gene.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Maybe the mysterious 18 year hold on warming is simply a product of the fact that - like a Ponzi scheme - we've reached the limits of enthusiasm and fabrication?

Without data tampering, the US has been cooling since the '30s.

//When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.//

Well, that's troubling for "settled science."

The Alps had no glaciers 4,000 years ago.

Casting serious doubt upon alarmist UN-IPCC projections that the Alps will be nearly glacier-free by 2100, Dr. Schlüchter poses several challenging questions:

* “Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later?”

* “Why did the Earth ‘tip’ in such a short time into a warming phase?”

* “Why did glaciers again advance in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1980s?”

“. . . Sooner or later, he added, “climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid.”

Although we witness ongoing IPCC attempts to blame such developments upon evil fossil-fueled CO2 emissions, that notion fails to answer these questions. Instead, Dr. Schlüchter believes that the sun is the principal long-term driver of climate change, with tectonics and volcanoes acting as significant contributors.

Regarding IPCC integrity with strong suspicion, Dr. Schlüchter recounts a meeting in England to which he was “accidentally” invited — a meeting led by “someone of the East Anglia Climate Center who had come under fire in the wake of the Climategate e-mails.”

As he describes it: “The leader of the meeting spoke like some kind of Father. He was seated at a table in front of those gathered and he took messages. He commented on them either benevolently or dismissively.”

Dr. Schlüchter’s view of the proceeding took a final nosedive towards the end of the discussion. As he noted: “Lastly it was about tips on research funding proposals and where to submit them best. For me it was impressive to see how the leader of the meeting collected and selected information.”

As a number of other prominent climate scientists I know will attest, there’s one broadly recognized universal tip for those seeking government funding. All proposals with any real prospects for success should somehow link climate change with human activities rather than to natural causes. Even better, those human influences should intone dangerous consequences.

Dr. Schlüchter warns that the reputation of science is becoming more and more damaged as politics and money gain influence. He concludes, “For me it also gets down to the credibility of science . . . Today many natural scientists are helping hands of politicians, and are no longer scientists who occupy themselves with new knowledge and data. And that worries me.”//

We need to give government more power over CO2 emissions so it can control....

....the volcanoes that are causing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to melt.

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.

UTA researchers used radar techniques to map water flows under ice sheets and estimate the rate of ice melt in the glacier. As it turns out, geothermal heat from magma and volcanoes under the glacier is much hotter and covers a much wider area than was previously thought.

“Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers,” UTA researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geothermal heat under the glaciers is likely a key factor in why the ice sheet is currently collapsing. Before this study, it was assumed that heat flow under the glacier was evenly distributed throughout, but UTA’s study shows this is not the case. Heat levels under the glacier are uneven, with some areas being much hotter than others.

“The combination of variable subglacial geothermal heat flow and the interacting subglacial water system could threaten the stability of Thwaites Glacier in ways that we never before imagined,” lead researcher David Schroeder said in a press release.

“It’s the most complex thermal environment you might imagine,” echoed co-author Don Blankenship “And then you plop the most critical dynamically unstable ice sheet on planet Earth in the middle of this thing, and then you try to model it. It’s virtually impossible.”

Argh....none of the Global Warming disaster predictions pan out.

The Emmanuel Goldstein Stage of American Politics.

Between this guy and Jerry Brown's statement blaming California wildfires on Republicans causing global warming - when Republicans have been shut out of government in California - it is clear that Republicans have entered the Emmanuel Goldstein stage of American politics.

Having an an enemy who can be conjured as necessary is so vital for keeping the base in line.

Most incompetent political elite class in American history.

The science isn't settled.  The consensus is a sham.  Dissenters are punished.

But We.Must.Do.Something.Now:

California Governor Jerry Brown released his state budget earlier this week and had some strong warnings about future cost impacts due to the effects of global warming.

According to some scientists, over the next couple of hundred years, sea levels could rise up to four feet and that will affect the airports in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the nuclear plant in San Onofre.
His comments:

If that happens, the Los Angeles airport’s going to be underwater.

So is the San Francisco airport.

You’re going to have to move all that … That’s billions, if not tens of billions. Luckily, we can take a few years.

The next day, a retraction was issued specifically about LAX. In an unusual move for a government official, someone had done some fact checking and discovered that LAX is over one hundred feet above sea level and a four-foot change would have “minimal impact on airport operations.” They did not comment on whether the state would be saving up to move San Onofre or SFO.

This episode reveals a couple of things about the man-made climate change issue. Firstly, broad and inflammatory warnings based upon conjecture are very quick to be issued. We really don’t know what is going to happen but we need to do something soon! Secondly, actual facts are a secondary issue. It’s a perfect example of symbolism over substance.

"Disaster is around the corner," cried the Prophet.

But it never arrives:

CHANGE: The Climate Change Debate Is Over, And Environmentalists Lost:

The bloodcurdling National Climate Assessment is here and it portends catastrophe; floods, clouds and other assorted weather events are imminent! … but , says the report, “there is still time to act to limit the amount of climate change and the extent of damaging impacts.”

Have you noticed that we’re always at the cusp of a cataclysm, yet the deadline to act always moves to a politically convenient not-too-distant future? I guess when the time to act runs out – it will at some point, right? — we can begin thinking about defunding all these panels and reinvesting in something more productive: like figuring out how we can adapt to the future.

You mean like former NASA scientist James Hansen?  “January 17, 2009 – NASA’s James Hansen told us that Obama had only four years to save the planet.”

And that was on top of declaring in 2004, as the American Thinker noted, “that there is only a ten-year window to act on AGW (presumably by transferring mass quantities of taxpayer funds to global warmist causes) before climate Armageddon destroys humanity.”

And then there were all of the not-so-final countdowns that were made on the first Earth Day, which have long since quietly expired, and Al Gore declaring in 2008 that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years,” beforetacitly declaring Mission Accomplished on radical environmentalism by selling out last year to big oil?

No, never noticed.

Just don't say it where normal people can hear you.

*Sheesh*

Part of being a science communicator is hoping a natural disaster kills as many members of the audience as possible, as soon as possible, with as much media exposure as possible. As a communicator myself, I’d like nothing better than if thousands of middle-class white people died in an extreme weather event—preferably one with global warming’s fingerprints on it. Live on cable news. Tomorrow.

The hardest thing about communicating the deadliness of the climate problem is that it isn’t killing anyone. And just between us, let’s be honest: the average member of the public is a bit (how can I put it politely?) of a moron. It’s all well and good for the science to tell us global warming is more dangerous than Nazism, but Joe Q. Flyover doesn’t understand science. He wants evidence.

So we’ve probably reached the limits of what science communication can achieve. At this point only nature herself can close the consensus gap—or the fear gap.//

Another cloud on the horizon.

Another professor calls for jailing people for thoughtcrime on "climate change."

Every time I hear about the consensus of climate scientists, I read a climate scientists saying something like this:

All of the above is background to one of the great mysteries of the climate change issue. Virtually all the scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous problems and uncertainties still associated with their product. How then is it that those of them involved in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can put their hands on their hearts and maintain there is a 95 per cent probability that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused most of the global warming that has occurred over the last several decades?

Bear in mind that the representation of clouds in climate models (and of water vapour, which is intimately involved with cloud formation) is such as to amplify the forecast warming from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide—on average over most of the models—by a factor of about three. In other words, two-thirds of the forecast rise in temperature derives from this particular model characteristic. Despite what the models are telling us—and perhaps because it is models that are telling us—no scientist close to the problem and in his right mind, when asked the specific question, would say that he is 95 per cent sure that the effect of clouds is to amplify rather than to reduce the warming effect of increasing carbon dioxide. If he is not sure that clouds amplify global warming, he cannot be sure that most of the global warming is a result of increasing carbon dioxide.

Bear in mind too that no scientist close to the problem and in his right mind, when asked the specific question, would say there is only a very small possibility (that is, less than 5 per cent) that internal ocean behaviour could be a major cause of the warming over the past half-century. He would be particularly careful not to make such a statement now that there has been no significant warming over the most recent fifteen or so years. In the mad scurry to find reasons for the pause, and to find reasons for an obvious failure of the models to simulate the pause, suddenly we are hearing that perhaps the heat of global warming is being “hidden” in the deep ocean. In other words we are being told that some internal oceanic fluctuation may have reduced the upward trend in global temperature. It is therefore more than a little strange that we are not hearing from the IPCC (or at any rate not hearing very loudly) that some natural internal fluctuation of the system may have given rise to most of the earlier upward trend.

In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour. Trading reputational capital for short-term political gain isn’t the most sensible way of going about things.

The trap was set in the late 1970s or thereabouts when the environmental movement first realised that doing something about global warming would play to quite a number of its social agendas. At much the same time, it became accepted wisdom around the corridors of power that government-funded scientists (that is, most scientists) should be required to obtain a goodly fraction of their funds and salaries from external sources—external anyway to their own particular organisation.//

Garth Paltridge is an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He is the author of The Climate Caper: Facts and Fallacies of Global Warming. He was a chief research scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research.

I thought that the story about the researchers who had to be rescued by helicopter on Christmas being there to study global warming was an internet hoax.

I thought that for two reasons:

First, the exact same story ran last year.

Second, the stories I was reading didn't mention that.

It appears, however, that I was wrong, and they were there to study global warming, and the media decided not to cover the "man bites dog" aspect of the story.

A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming.

Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.”

Two years in a row...now that is ironic.

Oh, noes!!! The end of the world has been postponed from 2013 to 2100.

From Io9:

A new study on environmental changes suggests that our future may be warmer than we thought — 4 degrees C warmer, to be exact. That's how much hotter the planet will be in 2100, as a result of changes in cloud cover. And this could prove catastrophic for human life.

Over at the Guardian, Damian Carrington notes that the 4 C rise is "twice what the world's governments deem dangerous" and is a higher estimate than what we've seen before from climate experts. That's because this new climate model accounts for changes in cloud cover:

The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change.

Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, said: "This study breaks new ground twice: first by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and second by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates."

"4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous," Sherwood told the Guardian. "For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheetand some of the Antarctic ice sheet", with sea levels rising by many metres as a result.

These "futuristic" predictions are churned out like clockwork, and then forgotten when they fail.

Remember 2000 when the prediction was no more snow in Britain...ever?

How did that turn out?  [Hint.]

What isn't forgotten is the fear it sparks in people who haven't been keeping track of these bogus stories.