Tag: News

By Lorne Gunter, National Post
Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn’t marry. That might generate the odd headline, no? Or if Don Cherry claimed suddenly to like European hockey players who wear visors and float around the ice never body-checking opponents. Or Jack Layton insisted out of the blue that unions are ruining the economy by distorting wages and protecting unproductive workers. Or Stephen Harper began arguing that it makes good economic sense for Ottawa to own a car company. (Oh, wait, that one happened.) But at least, the Tories-buy-GM aberration made all the papers and newscasts. When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy. So why was a speech last week by Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not give more prominence? Prof. Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously. Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change — Prof. Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.” The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land. But as Prof. Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. “How much?” he wondered before the assembled delegates. “The jury is still out.” But it is increasingly clear that global warming is on hiatus for the time being. And that is not what the UN, the alarmist scientists or environmentalists predicted. For the past dozen years, since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, it has been beaten into our heads with the force and repetition of the rowing drum on a slave galley that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100. While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the face: None of the alarmist drummers every predicted anything like a 30-year pause in their apocalyptic scenario. Prof. Latif says he expects warming to resume in 2020 or 2030. “People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he added. According to him, that is not the case. “I am not one of the skeptics,” he insisted. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.” In the past year, two other groups of scientists — one, like Prof. Latif, in Germany, the second in the United States — have come to the same conclusion: Warming is on hold, likely because of a cooling of the Earth’s upper oceans. It will resume, though, some day. But how is that knowable? How can Prof. Latif and the others state with certainty that after this long and unforeseen cooling, dangerous man-made heating will resume? They failed to observe the current cooling for years after it had begun, how then can their predictions for the resumption of dangerous warming be trusted? My point is they cannot. It’s true the supercomputer models Prof. Latif and other modellers rely on for their dire predictions are becoming more accurate. A major breakthrough last year in the modelling of past ocean currents finally enabled the computers to recreate the climate history of the 20th century (mostly) correctly. But getting the future equally correct is far trickier. Chances are some unforeseen future changes to real-world climate or further modifications to the UN’s climate computers will throw the current predictions out of whack long before the forecast resumption of warming.Source

By Matt Rogers, Washington Post This Capital Weather Gang blog entry is written with considerable trepidation given the politically-charged atmosphere surrounding human-induced global warming. I am a meteorologist with a life-long weather fascination. As I’m sure you know, meteorology is an inexact science due to the large number of variables involved in predicting and understanding the weather. I frequently say that weather forecasting is a humbling endeavor, and I have learned to respect its challenges. From this perspective, you might be able to better understand why I wince when hearing pronouncements such as “the science is settled”, “the debate is over”, or even the “the temperature in the 2050s is projected to be…” I realize that forecasting climate and weather are different, but both involve a large number of moving parts. There are numerous reasons why I question the consensus view on human-induced climate change covered extensively on this blog by Andrew Freedman. But for this entry, I scaled them down to ten: (10) Hurricanes: One of the strongest value propositions presented for fighting global warming is to slow tropical cyclone intensity increases. Katrina was cited as a prime example. But the storm only made landfall as a category three (five being strongest) and affected a city built below sea level. Stronger storms have hit North America before, but the Katrina route and the weak levees made this situation much worse. I follow global hurricane activity closely and earlier this summer, we reached a record low. Florida State has a site that tracks global hurricane activity here. Since the 1990s, this activity has been decreasing, which goes against what we were told to expect on a warming planet. (9) Ice Caps: In 2007, the Northern Hemisphere reached a record low in ice coverage and the Northwest Passage was opened. At that point, we were told melting was occurring faster than expected, and we needed to accelerate our efforts. What you were not told was that the data that triggered this record is only available back to the late 1970s. Prior to that, we did not have the satellite technology to measure areal ice extent. We know the Northwest Passage had been open before. In Antarctica, we had been told that a cooling of the continent was consistent with global climate models until a recent study announced the opposite was true. The lack of information and the inconsistencies do not offer confidence. (8) El Niño: This feature in the Tropical Pacific Ocean occurs when water temperatures are abnormally warm. Some climate change researchers predicted that global warming would create more and stronger El Niño events like the powerhouse of 1997-98. Indeed in 2006, esteemed climate scientist James Hansen, predicted this. But we are now about to complete an entire decade without a strong El Niño event (three occurred in the 1980s-1990s). So the more recent 2007 IPCC report backtracked from Hansen’s prediction, noting that there were too many uncertainties to understand how El Niño will behave with climate change. Recent research speaks to how important El Niño is to climate. In the past two decades, these warm El Niño and opposite cold La Niña events have accentuated the global temperature peaks and valleys highlighting the importance of natural variability and the limitations of the science. (7) Climate Models: To be blunt, the computer models that policy-makers are using to make key decisions failed to collectively inform us of the flat global land-sea temperatures seen in the 2000s (see more on this in item 5 below). The UN IPCC did offer fair warning of model inadequacies in their 2007 assessment. They mentioned a number of challenges, which is wholly reasonable since countless factors contribute to our global climate system–many of them not fully understood. My belief is that they are over-estimating anthropogenic (human) forcing influences and under-estimating natural variability (like the current cold-phase Pacific Decadal Oscillation and solar cycles). The chaos theory describes why it is far more difficult to project the future than climate scientists may realize (I give them a break here since climate modeling is in its relative infancy). We poor hapless meteorologists learned the chaos theory lesson long ago. (6) CO2 (Carbon Dioxide): The argument that the air we currently exhale is a bona fide pollutant due to potential impacts on climate change flummoxes me. CO2 is also plant food. Plants release oxygen for us, and we release CO2 for them. Over the summer, CO2 reached almost .04% of our total atmosphere as reported here. Because CO2 is but a sliver of our atmosphere, it is known as a “trace gas.” We all agree that it is increasing, but is there a chance that our estimate of its influence on the Greenhouse Effect is overblown given its small atmospheric ratio?

(5) Global Temperatures: As a meteorologist, verification is very important for guiding my work and improving future forecasts. The verification for global warming is struggling. Three of four major datasets that track global estimates show 1998 as the warmest year on record with temperatures flat or falling since then. Even climate change researchers now admit that global temperature has been flat since that peak. As shown above, the CO2 chart continues upwards unabated. If the relationship is as solid as we are told, then why isn’t global temperature responding? I’m told by climate change researchers that the current situation is within the bounds of model expectations. However, when I look at the IPCC 2007 AR4 WG1 report, I can see that without major warming in the next 1-2 years, we will fall outside those bounds. This is why I believe James Hansen is predicting a global temperature record in the next two years. (4) Solar Issue: Look for this issue to get bigger. Our sun is currently becoming very quiet. Not only is the number of sunspots falling dramatically, but the intensity of the sunspots is weakening. The coincident timing of major solar minimums with cooler global temperatures (such as during the Little Ice Age) suggests that maybe the sun is underestimated as a component for influencing climate. The second half of the twentieth century (when we saw lots of warming) was during a major solar maximum period– which is now ending. Total solar irradiance has been steady or sinking similar to our global temperatures over much of this past decade. Indeed, recent research has suggested the solar factor is underestimated (here and here). Perhaps one day, we’ll have a different version of James Carville’s famous political quote…something like “It’s the sun, stupid!” (3) But what about…? Ultimately after I explain my viewpoint on climate change, I get this question: “But what about all this crazy weather we’ve been having lately?” As a student of meteorology, we learned about amazing weather events in the past that have not been rivaled in the present. Whether it was the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, or even the worst tornado outbreak in history (1974), we have and will continue to see crazy weather. Very few statistics are available that correctly show an increase in these “crazy” events. (2) Silencing Dissent: I believe the climate is always changing. But what percentage of that change is human-induced? Like most, I believe that a more balanced energy supply benefits us politically due to the reduced reliance on foreign sources and benefits us locally due to improved air quality. But several times during debates individuals have told me I should not question the “settled science” due to the moral imperative of “saving the planet”. As with a religious debate, I’m told that my disagreement means I do not “care enough” and even if correct, I should not question the science. This frightens me. (1) Pullback: Does climate change hysteria represent another bubble waiting to burst? From the perspective of the alarmism and the saturation of the message, the answer could be yes. I believe that when our science or economic experts tend to be incorrect, it usually involves predictions that have underperformed expectations (Y2K, SARS, oil supply, etc). Can we think of any other expert-given, consensus-based, long-term predictions that have verified correctly? Not one comes to mind. I believe that predictions of human-caused climate change will continue to be overdone, and we’ll discover that natural factors are equally and sometimes even more important.Source via CCF

By Thomas Fuller, SF Environmental Policy Examiner

Monday, September 07 2009 15:33

Joe Romm Committee Hearing

© Andrew J Duck / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A lot of time and attention is spent on global warming. Barack Obama’s second major package of legislation (after the financial rescue but before the healthcare revamp) was cap and trade legislation, currently being considered by the Senate. It has occupied thousands of researchers (and an equal number of critics, it seems) and the attention of bloggers everywhere. But as originally put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of political analysts and policy makers commissioned by the U.N. 21 years ago, climate change was a technocratic issue designed to help politicians incorporate information about a slow but steady rise in temperatures into long term planning. It didn’t become headline material until U.S. Congressional hearings in 1988 and the pronouncements of a certain Al Gore, who I voted for three times and who I really wish would shut up. A new article in New Scientist tells us that a scientist working with the IPCC now says that global warming will disappear for one or two decades, swamped by the counter-effects of other natural cycles. “People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.” The funny thing is that if it weren’t for the hysteria surrounding the subject, this pronouncement would be natural, logical and quickly accepted. We know, after all, that many forces affect our climate–the tilt of the planet, cyclical changes in our orbit and changes in the orbit of the sun, cycles with various initials such as PDO, ENSO, etc., and other things that humans do, such as converting large swathes of the landscape to agriculture or cityscape, or diverting rivers and depleting aquifers. It’s only because the most hysterical of climate change activists have harped incessantly on the inexorable rise and cataclysmic effects of CO2 concentrations that any diversion from their projected path for temperatures seems to throw the whole issue into doubt. Had this remained a civil and scientific discussion within realms of possibility, the wider response to this would be ‘who cares?’ But when idiots like Glenn Beck and Joe Romm are foaming at the mouth on either side of the issue, there is no room for reasoned discussion. You know what? Global warming may well disappear for two decades and then reappear. That’s because it is one of, and not the strongest, forces that affect our climate. It will tend to push long term temperature averages up by 2 degrees Celsius if concentrations of CO2 double. Sea levels may rise 18 inches this century instead of a foot. We may have to reinforce some sea walls and change some zoning regulations as a result. The story from New Scientist is only relevant insofar as it shuts up some hysterics. If it does so and the conversation continues in more reasoned terms, it is to be welcomed. Otherwise, like the rest of the discussion on climate change, it should be in the background, analysed by technocrats and other scientists, with the occasional updates for those of us with an interest in the subject matter.
Source via CCF

By Jon Ferry, The Province

The best time to dump a stock, so the experts say, is when the hysteria surrounding it has reached its zenith. And, as a story in the U.K. media over the weekend makes clear, we’ve now reached that point in the feeding frenzy over the issue of human-induced global warming.

Now is the time to back the truck up, dump the garbage out and start again with a clean sheet — before we all go bonkers.

The story in the prestigious Sunday Times describes how the Royal Society, the U.K.’s top science institution, is backing research into simulated volcanic eruptions to stave off climate change. This, we are told, is on the grounds that “pouring sulphur-based particles into the upper atmosphere could be one of the few options available to humanity to keep the world cool.”

Keep the world cool? As a long-time global-warming skeptic, I think these Brit researchers are tilting at windmills. They arrogantly seem to think their dabblings in “geo-engineering” can regulate the Earth’s warming and cooling, as if they were dialling a thermostat up and down.

I mean what happens if, while they’re simulating these eruptions and spraying millions of tons of dust in the air, an actual eruption takes place — like that of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 — and the world cools down a bit too much? Will they trigger a new ice age?

Manchester University professor Brian Launder is quoted in the story by environment editor Jonathan Leake as saying that, without carbon-dioxide reductions or geo-engineering, “civilization as we know it will end within our grandchildren’s lifetime.”

My view is that civilization has already ended — at least at most western universities, where for too long kids have been brainwashed into eco-conformity by political zealots masquerading as professors.

Bold counter-action is needed. Indeed, if I was in charge, I’d end all this ideologically driven, academic nonsense before our politicians do something really dumb . . . like peppering the planet with huge, bird-killing wind machines.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what they seem intent on doing. They’re known as wind “farms.” And as anybody who has lived near them knows, they’re not just ugly, they’re unreliable and inefficient as power producers. Moreover, they require taxpayer subsidies to be economic.

So far, B.C. doesn’t have many of these modern windmills. Even the one with 37-metre blades being constructed at the top of Grouse Mountain isn’t in operation yet, though resort spokesman William Mbaho told me that “assembly should take place this month.”

It’s a privately-owned wind turbine that will undoubtedly make a bold statement. But I strongly suspect it’ll be a statement about its value as a tourist attraction rather than as a generator of electricity.

Not that I have anything against that. As B.C.’s budget shows, our province is desperate for dollars wherever it can get them.

Let’s not pretend, however, that erecting windmills will alter the Earth’s climate . . . any more than setting off phony volcanoes will.

Email Jon: jferry@theprovince.com

Source via our partners at Puget Sound Radio

The Senate is now considering the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House in June on 219-212 vote. This bill, which is supported by Al Gore and his band of global warming alarmists would raise our electricity prices through the roof. It would also send millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs to foreign countries. Working families would be hurt the most by higher and higher utility bills and gasoline prices. But many big corporations hope to strike it rich. Al Gore’s investment funds, General Electric, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, GM, Ford, Caterpillar, Shell, BP, and Goldman Sachs all support cap-and-trade. Tell your Senators to vote for the American people and against the special interests by voting NO.