First, let’s compare two headlines from Climate Depotthat appeared in British newspapers within the past decade:
Killer winter storms for next THIRTY years;
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.
One should read my post on the “no snow”as well. Do you get the sense that these guys are full of crap?
Well, here is the story on the coldest temp yet recorded on earth, via The Big Story:
Feeling chilly? Here’s cold comfort: You could be in East Antarctica which new data says set a record for “soul-crushing” cold.
Try 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit below zero; that’s 93.2 degrees below zero Celsius, which sounds only slightly toastier. Better yet, don’t try it. That’s so cold scientists say it hurts to breathe.
A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees.
The old record had been -128.6 degrees, which is -89.2 degrees Celsius.
Ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the new record is “50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota.”
“It’s more like you’d see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles,” Scambos said, from the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco Monday, where he announced the data. “I’m confident that these pockets are the coldest places on Earth.”
There are too many stories like this to post, so this one is a reminder that what appears on the front pages of the legacy media are often retracted years later on some back page of the newspaper or website. The newest “death knell” for a theory that even made it into Al Gore’s An Inconvinient Truth, as far back as 2010, was falling apart:
About 15 to 20 years ago, folks began to notice problems in amphibian communities around the world. At first, physical deformities were being noticed and then large population declines were being documented.
The finger was initially pointed at the coal industry, with an idea that perhaps mercury was leading to the deformities. But this didn’t pan out. Next, farm practices came under fire, as excess fertilizer running off into farm ponds became the leading suspect. But that theory didn’t hold water either. Then, attention turned to the ozone hole, with the idea that increased ultraviolet radiation was killing the frogs. No luck there either.
Then came the Eureka moment—aha, it must be global warming!
This played to widespread audiences, received beaucoup media attention and, of course, found its way into Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
But, alas, this theory, too, wilted under the harsh glare of science, as new research has now pretty definitively linked an infection of the chytrid fungus to declines, and even local extinctions, of frog and toad species around the world….
From UC Davis: National survey finds frog abnormalities rare
A 10-year study shows some good news for frogs and toads on national wildlife refuges. The rate of abnormalities such as shortened or missing legs was less than 2 percent overall — indicating that the malformations first reported in the mid-1990s were rarer than feared. But much higher rates were found in local “hotspots,” suggesting that where these problems occur they have local causes. The results were published Nov. 18 in the journal PLOS ONE.
“We now know what the baseline is and the 2 percent level is relatively good news, but some regions need a deeper look,” said Marcel Holyoak, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author on the study. Hotspot regions included the Mississippi River Valley, California and south-central and eastern Alaska.
Mari Reeves, a graduate student working with Holyoak, led the data analysis and is corresponding author on the paper. Reeves now works at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska.
Fieldwork for the study was carried out by the Fish and Wildlife Service at 152 refuges across the country between 2000 and 2009. Researchers collected more than 68,000 frogs and toads for the study.
[….]
The results show that abnormality hotspots occur in specific places, but within these hotspots the rate of malformations can change over time, Holyoak said.
“We see them at an elevated frequency one year or for a few years, and then they recover,” he said.
The most common problems observed were missing or shortened toes or legs, and skin cysts. Only 12 cases of frogs with extra legs were found.
…Another major European media outlet is asking: Where’s the global warming?
Image right: The August 7 edition of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten featured a major 2-page article on the globe’s 15-years of missing warming and the potential solar causes and implications.
Moreover, they are featuring prominent skeptic scientists who are warning of a potential little ice age and dismissing CO2 as a major climate driver. And all of this just before the release of the IPCC’s 5AR, no less!
[….]
The Jyllands-Posten quotes David Hathaway:
‘We now have the lowest solar activity in 100 years,’ David Hathaway from American space research institute NASA newly concluded in connection to the release of new figures for the sun’s activity. He said the activity for the ongoing cycle is half of the previous cycle, and he predicted an even lower activity for the next cycle, which will hit us in few years.”
Suddenly even the greenest of media outlets among us are contemplating what the consequences of a quiet sun may be. The JP then quotes Irish solar specialist Ian Elliott, who says these consequences could be dramatic:
It indicates that we may be on the path to a new little ice age. It seems likely we are on the path to a period with very low solar activity, which could mean that we may have some very cold winters.”
Elliott then cites the ice-cold winters of 2009 and 2010 as early signs.
JP then cites at length Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, who needs no introduction:
Since the 1940s and up to 10 years ago we have had the highest solar activity in 1000 years. The last time we had solar activity that high was when we had the Medieval Warm Period from year 1000 to around 1300. … Historically there has been a close connection between solar activity and temperature for the last 1000 years. Therefore the sun’s activity will also have influence the coming many years. … The unusual thing right now is that sun’s activity is decreasing while there’s a great increase in atmospheric CO2. For that reason the question is how much the earth will cool in a time of decreasing solar activity. … The development is beautifully consistent with a cooling effect of the solar activity in the same period. This could mean that the temperature will not rise for the next 30 years or maybe begin to decrease.”
Climate scientist Dr. Murry Salby, Professor and Climate Chair at Macquarie University, Australia explains in a recent, highly-recommended lecture presented at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany, why man-made CO2 is not the driver of atmospheric CO2 or climate change.
Dr. Salby demonstrates:
CO2 lags temperature on both short [~1-2 year] and long [~1000 year] time scales
The IPCC claim that “All of the increases [in CO2 concentrations since pre-industrial times] are caused by human activity” is impossible
“Man-made emissions of CO2 are clearly not the source of atmospheric CO2 levels”
Satellite observations show the highest levels of CO2 are present over non-industrialized regions, e.g. the Amazon, not over industrialized regions
96% of CO2 emissions are from natural sources, only 4% is man-made
Net global emissions from all sources correlate almost perfectly with short-term temperature changes [R2=.93] rather than man-made emissions
Methane levels are also controlled by temperature, not man-made emissions
Climate model predictions track only a single independent variable – CO2 – and disregard all the other, much more important independent variables including clouds and water vapor.
The 1% of the global energy budget controlled by CO2 cannot wag the other 99%
Climate models have been falsified by observations over the past 15+ years
Climate models have no predictive value
Feynman’s quote “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with the data, it’s wrong” applies to the theory of man-made global warming.
Global-warming alarmists continually refer to a “scientific consensus” to support drastic policy proposals. They insist on peer-reviewed publications as the standard for debate, while ignoring that standard when the standard will not support their hysterical claims. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report had notable examples, such as Amazongate (where rain-forest sensitivity to small changes in rainfall were well publicized, but were based on a blog post from an activist website); and the widely hyped, but wildly unscientific, claims of the imminent demise of Himalayan glaciers. The federal government also publishes a climate assessment report. Patrick Michaels of Cato and Harold Doiron of the Right Climate Stuff team have analyzed the draft of the most recent National Climate Assessment and found its scientific rigor to be wanting.
I really have been struggling to summon up much enthusiasm for the inanities of John Cook’s paper, but Brandon Schollenberger has written an extraordinary analysis of the data, which really has to be seen to be believed. Readers are no doubt aware that the paper involves rating abstracts of a whole bunch of research papers to see where they stand on the global warming question.
The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
…some folks aren’t getting the significance of Schollenberger’s findings, using Cook’s own data and code, which have been shown to be replicable at Lucia’s comment thread, Schollenberger finds 65 that say AGW/human caused, but there’s 78 that reject AGW. Cook never reported that finding in the paper, thus becoming a lie of omission, because it blows the conclusion. Combine that with the lack of reporting of the 32.6%/66.1% ratio in Cook’s own blog post and media reports, and we have further lies of omission.
Here is a partial transcript of Marc’s statements that have links to info (via NewsBusters), Marc ISClimate Depot:
MARC MORANO, CLIMATE DEPOT: We followed the evidence. There are quite literally hundreds of factors that influence global temperature, everything from tilt of the earth’s axis to ocean cycles to water vapor, methane, solar system, the sun, cloud feedback, volcanic dust. The idea that CO2 is the tail that wags the dog is not supportable.
And if you go down and look at the scientific literature, we are finding reams of data. And new peer-reviewed study showing the Medieval and Roman warming periods as warm or warmer than today without our CO2 emissions. So what’s happened here is the whole movement, because now we’ve gone 16 years without global warming, according to the U.N. data [from UK Met Office], and they’ve now morphed into extreme weather.
And we have the absurd spectacle of people claiming that acts of Congress and United Nations can control the weather and make hurricanes less nasty and make tornadoes less frequent, which by the way none of them are showing any trends at all that are unusual.
MORGAN: Well, so Marc Morano, if there is a massively increased acceleration in CO2 in the atmosphere at the same time that there’s been a bigger than double the sizing of the population of the planet, why would that not be inexorably linked? Explain to me.
MORANO: CO2 is rising. No one is disputing that. What Bill and I just did was waste everyone’s time explaining that CO2 is rising. The question is what impact does CO2 have on the weather, what impact the CO2 have on climate change. And that, as we you look at the geologic records, we’ve had warmer periods where it’s been — with higher — with lower CO2 and we’ve had colder periods with higher CO2. And you have to go way back for some of that but the bottom line is hundreds of factors are dictating our climate.
The Medieval Warm Period was both southern and northern hemisphere. On my Web site there’s literally [scores of studies] — it demolishes the idea of a hockey stick, new peer-reviewed study, so the idea that Bill Nye is just going around saying CO2 is up, therefore global warming is dangerous, we should be concerned, it’s not. It’s not dangerous. The bottom line is all these factors —
[….]
MORANO: No. You go to the peer-reviewed literature. You’re looking at anecdotal evidence. This is now the level of your daily horoscope. Basically global warmists like Bill Nye say global warming will cause many bad weather events and guess what? Bad weather events happen all the time so people look and they say look, there’s more proof, there’s a bad weather event.
Bottom line, big tornadoes, F-3 and larger since 1950s have dropped dramatically. Bottom line, we’ve gone the longest period without a major U.S. category 3 or larger hurricane hitting the U.S. since 1900, maybe the civil war.
Bottom line, new study in the “Journal Nature,” peer-reviewed, no change in U.S. drought in the last 60 years. Bottom line, a new study out shows that drought has not changed in 85 to —
[….]
MORANO: Why it’s the wrong argument? Because every proposal ever done including the United Nations Kyoto Protocol would not even detectibly impact the temperatures assuming you buy into their science. What we’re talking about —
NYE: We’re not talking about the temperature. MORANO: We’re talking about a climate bill in the United States. President Obama was going around telling people it will keep the planet four or five degrees cooler for our grandchildren. His own EPA said it wouldn’t affect global CO2 levels let alone temperature. And if you actually do —
NYE: CO2 —
(CROSSTALK)
MORANO: Right now the developing world is getting 1,000 plus coal plants, there are 1.3 billion people don’t have running water and electricity. If we actually go the route of trying to stop carbon- based energy which has been their lifeline, which would lower infant mortality and long life expectancy, it would be the most immoral position you can take. So the bottom line is even if the skeptics are wrong the solutions that the global warming alarmists have proposed would have no detectible impact on climate.
[….]
MORANO: … that violate 81 one out of 87 of the basic principles of forecasting.
NYE: So —
MORGAN: Marc Morano, do you accept that the ocean levels are rising, that the planet is getting hotter, that CO2 emissions have dramatically increased in the last 50 years, and —
NYE: And ice sheets are shrinking.
MORGAN: Ice sheets are shrinking and the planet population is doubling and accelerating at a terrifying rate, and that the combination of all these things is likely to be a major problem for the next two or three generations, and therefore, doing nothing shouldn’t really be a sensible responsible option. MORANO: Doing nothing — first of all the United States did nothing, our CO2 emissions are dropping as we move to fracking away from coal through technology so the idea of nothing — there’s nothing to do. The idea of — there’s no way you can solve a nonproblem. Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age. There’s no acceleration. The Dutch Meteorological Institute said there’s no acceleration. You can look at the data, the land base data.
NYE: We just don’t agree on the facts. So we’re not going to get anywhere.
MORANO: Where it goes — the scary and where the horror story is in all these predictions. And they come out and say it’s worse than we thought. Why —
The Left (in this case Bill Nye and Piers Morgan) are referencing a religious eschatology that use to reside only with the religious… now the professional, secular Left has their own ideology of Armageddon. I would rather depend on more sound — and less eschatological — decisions made on these matters:
▼ “We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.
▼ “Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” — NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.
▼ “Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself — Climate is beyond our power to control…Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” — Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Remember, we have had most of the Co2 produced in world history since 1998, and we have had no warming for 16-years. So the connection Bill Nye tries to make is fictitious so far.
✦ The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
✦ This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
LONDON — British explorer Ranulph Fiennes on Monday pulled out of an expedition to cross Antarctica during the region’s winter after developing frostbite — a bitter disappointment for an adventurer who had spent years preparing for one of the last great polar challenges.
…the expedition team hopes ‘The Coldest Journey’ will draw attention to global warming — namely, the effect that climate change has wrought upon the polar ice cap. [Via The Reference Frame]
One comment on Nelson’s post is as follows:
Unfortunately, with all the extra ice in Antarctica they had to go further than they thought. Still, as global warmists, they will have refused to believe that there could possibly have been an increase in sea ice.
One explanation of why Global Warming has not been happening for the past decade[+] is explained by the University of Colorado (Via WUWT):
A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are hiding in plain sight — dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide.
The study results essentially exonerate Asia, including India and China, two countries that are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning, said lead study author Ryan Neely, who led the research as part of his CU-Boulder doctoral thesis. Small amounts of sulfur dioxide emissions from Earth’s surface eventually rise 12 to 20 miles into the stratospheric aerosol layer of the atmosphere, where chemical reactions create sulfuric acid and water particles that reflect sunlight back to space, cooling the planet.
Bottom line: There’s still no consensus from climate scientists about the cause of the slowdown in the warming rate of global surface temperatures.
And of course, the sea surface temperature and ocean heat content reveal another reason: there hadn’t been a strong El Niño to release monumental volumes of warm water from below the surface of the tropical Pacific and shift up the sea surface temperatures of the Atlantic, Indian and West Pacific Oceans. Refer to my essay “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” and my ebook Who Turned on the Heat?
In case you are out of the loop, no warming has occurred in 16-years:
✦ The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
✦ This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
There will always be those who cannot admit the obvious, for obvious reasons (CFACT):
And this denial is political, not evidential, as David Mamet points out in his book:
* “The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. . . . Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
(Varying audio levels) From video description: “Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James Taylor debates Ray Bellamy, M.D., a Tallahassee Orthopedic Surgeon at the Elks Club Lodge at 276 North Magnolia Drive in Tallahassee, Florida on Jan. 8, 2013.” (Posted by: Religio-Political Talk) One commentator said this of the debate:
Thanks Anthony. No wonder the alarmists don’t like debating. In the closing remarks, after Taylor summarises the science, Bellamy just engages in a series of ad homs against Dr Soon and Dr Singer, and then admits what he had just claimed was a direct quote was ‘paraphrased’, to a chorus of boos from the audience. Epic fail! A shame the bootlegged video ends at that point, but we may look forward to many more such debates in future. /sarc
Another said, “As an Orthopaedic surgeon myself, I am embarrassed.” Still another, “No wonder Gore sold out and cashed in…” All I have to say is thatthe only thing Gore’s student learned was to be boring.
Finally … finally! … a person trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to face off in a public debate on global warming. As WUWT readers may know, trying to get one of these folks to debate a skeptic has been an impossible task…until now. Full video follows, running about 59 minutes.
While I don’t know the details, I suspect the video quality has to do with an apparent long standing policy of Gore’s presenters refusing to allow their presentations to be video taped. My impression is that this appears to be a clandestine recording made by an audience member.
From an email I [http://wattsupwiththat.com/] received:
======================================
Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project squared off against The Heartland Institute in a global warming debate January 8 in Tallahassee, Florida. More than 260 people attended the hour-long debate, which resulted in standing room only at the Tallahassee Elks Club Lodge, which hosted the debate.
Ray Bellamy, a Florida State University faculty member who gives public presentations on behalf of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, argued humans are causing a global warming crisis. Taylor countered that global warming activists have proven none of four important factors they need to show in order to demonstrate a human-induced global warming crisis.
“I am very happy that this debate is now available on the Internet so people can see the for themselves, without having to wade through media filters, who possesses and presents the best evidence in a fair and balanced debate,” said Taylor.
“I encourage people to watch the debate and then share it with friends, family and acquaintances. So long as people have access to the truth, I believe the truth will always prevail,” said Taylor.
Joe Bastardi, Joseph D’Aleo, Alan Lammey, and guest Harold Ambler dissect some of the preconceived ideas being assumed by politicians such as Hillary Clinton in the cuture war of global warming, e.g., climate change. (Posted by Religio-Political Talk)
