Global Warming Archives

Climate Change, Then and Now

In February, 2014, in asking "The End of Snow?", the NY Times noted that Europe would lose ski resorts if the warming continue. It then warned…

The same could happen in the United States, where in the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters.

That was then. This is USA Today.

Last month, Siberia experienced record snowfall and the worst blizzard in a decade.

Above-average snow cover in Siberia is believed to affect the now-famous polar vortex and send bitterly cold temperatures to the Northeast. This happens when the Arctic Oscillation, a climate pattern, shifts.

The headline on the article reads, "Record Siberian snow could bode ill for Northeast". So it’s bad news for New England if it doesn’t snow, and it’s bad news if it does. That’s why it’s impossible to argue with the Climate Change crows; no matter the news, it’s bad.

Yes, yes, climate vs. weather they tell us. But they don’t listen to suggestions that last years temps were just weather, and that the Arctic wind pattern that may bring all that cold to the northeast US may be the planet’s way of adjusting.

Oh, and predictions of global cooling are not off the table, either.

Settled indeed.

Global Warming Update

"Antarctic sea ice has set a new record for May, with extent at the highest level since measurements began in 1979."

And it’s not a blip, but a trend that’s been going on since 1979.

A Chilling Effect

What if I told you that ice levels in Antarctica have reached 35-year record highs? What if I told you that the rise in the surface temperature of the earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that? And what if I told you that the lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace?

Well figure out what you would do if I told you, because I’m telling you. And I’ll tell you this as well; many climate scientists aren’t sure what to do. They’re trying to come up with explanations, but so far they’re just theories plucked out of thin air.

When the facts don’t fit the theories, scientists claim that they will rework the theories. Well, so far, we’ve seen little reworking and more digging in. And here’s another “what if”; what if the media gave this as much attention as they did stories of a spot here or a point there where warming is occurring? This isn’t weather, as they love to say; this is a pause in the warming of the climate that they’re having trouble figuring out. What if people were told about this, or is liberal orthodoxy in the media having a chilling effect?

Climate Models That Aren’t Modeling

In October of 2012, I noticed an article noting that global warming had essentially stopped since 1997. Well, it’s still stopped, and Professor Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology is taking a closer look at it.

A paper by her in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics not only explains the pause, it suggests that the scientific majority have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases. This is the foundation on which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC report we keep hearing about) is built, and she’s shaking it to the core.

Imagine that; nature – the massive ecosystem that is our planet Earth – has more influence than man.

Check out this article that includes a graph of what all the various and sundry climate models have predicted, and then a line showing reality. The climate is now at a point at the bottom of the lowest prediction model. On top of that, Professor Curry says that this is likely to continue until at least 2035. She presents evidence of natural cycles that can be documents for the past 300 years in making this claim.

Now, accept or reject Professor Curry’s data or conclusions, we still are left with the nagging issue of predictions, used by the UN, that were presented with 95+% certainty. Somebody didn’t tell Mother Nature. Well, more likely, as Prof. Curry said, “The growing divergence between climate model simulations and observations raises the prospect that climate models are inadequate in fundamental ways.”

“Inadequate.” That’s putting it mildly. Not unlike our climate, actually.

The Science Was Settled

That is, during the 1970s, what they were saying about global cooling sounds quite a lot like what they’re saying today about global warming. Anthony Watts has compiled 65 stories from that era that talked up the dangers of a new Ice Age, including remedies like outlawing the internal combustion engine, population control, and the loss of democracy to save us from the coming disaster.  And these were just those available online from a time 20 years before the Internet.

This includes findings from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, so it’s not just a bunch of journalists getting themselves in a tizzy. So this is something for a little perspective.

The Science is … Settled?

If it is, it may not be in the way  you’ve been told.

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

Is this some sort of sea change? Again, not necessarily.

Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.

An inconvenient truth, to be sure.

Without much fanfare, figures were released recently that shows global temperatures remaining flat for the past 16 years.

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.

Three years ago, when this trend was becoming clear, Professor Phil Jones (director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and who was part of the whole "Climategate" scandal which leaked e-mails among prominent climate scientists at East Anglia) said this:

Yet in 2009, when the plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, he told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom  line: the “no upward trend” has to  continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

But although that point has now been passed, he said that he hadn’t changed his mind about the  models’ gloomy predictions:  ‘I still think that the current decade which began in 2010 will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.’

Only if that did not happen would he seriously begin to  wonder whether something more profound might be happening. In other words, though five years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years.

Keep moving those goalposts, guys.

The article is full of opinions, on all sides of the climate change issue, saying that the climate is still not fully understood. But it’s supposedly understood enough to want to create global economic upheaval in order to "fix" something that may not be broken. Fortunately, the current global economic situation has given politicians less of a stomach for huge taxes.

Friday Link Wrap-up

Hobby Lobby could be the next Chick-Fil-A. “Hobby Lobby Sues over HHS Mandate”

Reverend William Owens from the Coalition Of African American Pastors in an interview with John Hawkins: “Again that’s the reason I took such a stand against President Obama. In every election, in every campaign where the marriage amendment has been on the ballot, blacks in large numbers have been against it and Americans have been against it. But he’s not interested in what the people want. He’s interested in what a few people who can give him big money want.”

I don’t usually link to Sojourner’s “God’s Politics” blog for good examples of political opinion, but their non-political item — a discussion on the recent “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” discovery — is quite good. “Five Important Questions About That ‘Jesus Wife’ Discovery”

“Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year).” I blame global warming.

UN Secretary General George Orwell Ban Ki Moon: “Freedoms of expression should be and must be guaranteed and protected, when they are used for common justice, common purpose,” Ban told a news conference. “When some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected in such a way.”

Bullying works. “The Christian-rooted fast food restaurant [Chick-filA] agreed to stop funding groups such as Focus on the Family that oppose same-sex marriage in a meeting with the Chicago politician who had been blocking the company’s move there.”

And finally, competing mottos (from Chuck Asay, click for a larger version):

No, not Al Gore.

Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory.

Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.

His inventions have been used by NASA, among many other scientific organizations.

Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture detector in 1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere, leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern environmental movement.

But this father of a movement has some scolding for his children. In a previous interview, he noted, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” This was in acknowledgement of the fact that global temperatures just haven’t gone up the way the computer models predicted. Acknowledging that error is certainly a step in the right direction, but let’s not forget that the massive drain on our economy that Greens the world over would have wanted to implement based on those flawed models would have made this recession even worse.

Now, he’s not renouncing man-made global warming, but he is asking folks who do agree with him to just calm down a bit and look at some realities. His advice?

  • He’s for more nuclear power and natural gas "fracking".
  • Ratchet back the whole green "religion" guilting.
  • Modern economies will not be powered by windmills and "so-called ‘sustainable development’." That is "meaningless drivel".
  • No, the science isn’t settled. That’s not how science works.

Read the whole thing.

Friday Link Wrap-up

A federal government out of control. Without any evidence, Attorney General Eric Holder took a woman to court for obstructing the entrance to an abortion clinic. The judge threw out the case and ordered the government to pay $120,000 to the woman. Yes, it’s good that the woman was compensated, but this case should have never gone to court.

I think Julian Assange has been irresponsible for dumping secret data that, in many cases, has put lives at risk or tipped our hand to enemies. Still, it’s nice to know that, in all that, George W. Bush has been vindicated in his handling of the Iraq/WMD situation.

I agree with the sentiment that the teen’s shirt said, "Jesus Is Not A Homophobe". However, I also think that the folks he thinks need that message aren’t, for the most part, homophobes either, if, by "homophobe" you mean "someone who agrees with 2000 years of Christian teaching".

Global Warming Update: "The number of [polar] bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt."

James O’Keefe is at it again. He, a white guy, to prove that voter fraud really is simple, something that Attorney General Eric Holder denies, was able to (almost) vote in the primary as Eric Holder himself, a black guy. Extremely easy.

An atheist who threatened to sue over a Nativity scene, was helped in his time of need by the very Christians he had threatened. Result: He’s now a Christian preparing to enter the  ministry.

John Stossel, libertarian and (when he was at ABC News) a contrarian in the media, describes the liberal bias at his old network.

Ever since Jimmy Carter got snookered by giving food to North Korea in exchange for an empty promise not to pursue nukes, we keep hoping that they’ll change their mind about belligerence if we bribe them well enough. It hasn’t worked, and it won’t work. A dictator that will spend who knows how many millions on a missile program while his country starves is patently not concerned about his people. Period. No amount of appealing to his better nature will change that. Now that N. Korea has test launched (what Rick Moore calls) a "three-stage artificial reef", now we’re serious. Now we mean business. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Civility Watch: "Moderate Caucus" chairman, a Democrat, tweets, "Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams."

 Page 1 of 8  1  2  3  4  5 » ...  Last »