Germany warned Thursday that a European Commission plan to auction pollution rights threatened key sectors of German and European industry.
Julie Walsh
The New York Times today suddenly finds outrage in someone not having the taxpayer facilitate an airing of their views on climate change. No, it wasn’t bullying of head and assistant state climatologists like Pat Michaels, David Legates, George Taylor, Mark Albright, et al., over which the Grey Lady wasn’t exactly exercised. It is about a high school presentation that some parents objected to because of the lack of balance. In Montana. Get our man at the New York Times on this, stat!
But in this rather overwrought article, “Climate Talk’s Cancellation Splits a Town”, we see an individual who is, with great media assistance, serially and apparently in all seriousness milking this phony tag of “Nobel laureate” for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Enough already. Let the record reflect that, according to the Nobel Committee, neither he or the hundreds of anthropology TAs et al are Nobel laureates, any more than the carbon trader-funded DeSmogBlog’s Ross Gelbspan is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The IPCC as a discrete legal entity, the organization based in Geneva, shared the award, 50/50, "in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.” Not anyone who served as an author, expert reviewer, or otherwise. Not 50% and .5/2500. Read the award speech and you’ll see that the 130 countries taking part in the IPCC were given equal praise as the authors et al.
Let that one sink in.
Yes, the press release and other associated statements said things like “Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming”. They also said “Currently over 130 countries are taking part, with 450 authors and 800 contributors, while 2,500 scientific experts take part in the hearings”.
I know that many IPCC participants openly dispute the claims with which they are associated by virtue of their efforts to keep the IPCC honest, like John Christy, Vincent Gray, and many, many others, but there’s really no point in continuing this charade simply to note that fact.
Al Gore won the Nobel, along with a group in Geneva. Not a bunch of alarmists who seem desperate for reflected glory. They only helped. Just like President Bush.
A new study, much hyped by the media, blames humans for escalating ice loss in Antarctica. The media, however, seems to have no idea as to how truly manmade the supposed ice loss may be.
“Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica; Sheets Melting in an Area Once Thought to Be Unaffected by Global Warming” was the Washington Post’s front-page, above-the-fold headline last Monday (Jan. 14). The headline for the continuation of the article was “Antarctic Ice Loss Could Speed Rise in Ocean Levels.”
If true, it would be quite a worrisome situation given that Antarctica contains enough ice to raise ocean levels by about 60 meters, a deluge that would put every major coastal city in the world deep under water and uproot hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.
NASA scientist Eric Rignot reported in Nature Geoscience (Jan. 13) that increased melting had been detected in the ice sheets of western Antarctica, an area where surface temperatures have remained unchanged.
As warming surface temperatures could not be blamed for the ice loss, Rignot hypothesized that the cause may be the flow of warmer waters from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that circles much of the continent. “Something must be changing the ocean to trigger such changes,” Rignot told the Post. “We believe it is related to [manmade global warming]”, he added.
Rignot may indeed “believe” that humans are the cause – he is, after all, part of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization founded on the belief that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. But the facts belie such beliefs.
First, standard climate alarmism claims that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases are warming surface temperatures. But not only is such warming not being observed in Antarctica, it’s actually getting cooler in western Antarctica, according to surface temperature analysis from each of eight NASA stations located there.
Rignot, of course, admits that standard climate alarmism can’t possibly explain the western Antarctic melting; that’s why he shifted to blaming man for the warmer Antarctic Circumpolar Current. But is this true?
In an effort to support Rignot’s hypothesis, Columbia University’s Douglas Martinson told The Washington Post that “the [Antarctic Circumpolar Current”, which flows about 200 yards below the frigid surface water, began to warm significantly in the 1980s, and that warming in turn caused wind patterns to change in ways that ultimately brought more warm water to shore.”
But Martinson also admitted to the Post that there is not enough data to say for certain that the process was set in motion by global warming. Truth be told, there is good reason to question Martinson's assertion about the temperature trend, let alone its hypothetical cause.
According to World Climate Report, a 2007 study by University of Washington researchers reported that, although there is much interest among scientists in ocean temperature, “below-surface ocean temperature data are sparse, and the existing data sets involve substantial ‘interpolation, extrapolation, and averaging’ that may compromise the integrity of results from such data sets.”
Adding to the mix is the most recent IPCC report, which says that the upper ocean adjacent to west Antarctica warmed by 1 degree Celsius from 1951 to 1994. But global surface temperatures actually declined from 1940 to 1976, even as manmade emissions of carbon dioxide dramatically increased.
The bottom line is there is no established linkage between manmade emissions of greenhouse gases and any melting in the western Antarctic.
But then, is there even any net ice loss in the western Antarctic to begin with?
While Rignot did use satellite observations of Antarctica’s coastline to estimate melting, he compared this real-life data to computer model estimates of Antarctic interior snow accumulation. So the western Antarctic appears to losing mass only when compared to computer models that, when it comes to global climate, are of questionable relevance to the real world.
At JunkScience.com, we label these sorts of computer modeling exercises as “PlayStation® climatology.”
Even if you put faith in climate models, Rignot’s don’t seem to agree with those of the IPCC, which stated in its most recent assessment, “Current global model studies project that the Antarctic Ice Sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall.”
Finally, according to NOAA data presented on the web site of Bill Chapman of the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), the global level of sea ice has reached about the same level as it was at in 2003. The current change in global sea ice coverage is a positive 1 million square kilometers — that is, a gain of 1.8 million square kilometers in the Southern Hemisphere netted against a loss of 800,000 square kilometers in the Northern Hemisphere.
It’s quite possible that the reported Antarctic melting is manmade — but the “man” may be Eric Rignot, as opposed to the term’s broader connotation.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Some of the text of the comic strip: “More than 400 prominent scientists around the world now say they have major objections to the so-called ‘consensus’ that global warming is ‘man-made.’ Never fear, however; the ‘consensus’ on ‘man-made’ global warming in the mainstream media is as healthy as ever.”
After an outcry of objections, the California Energy Commission withdrew its proposal to require new buildings in the state to have radio-controlled thermostats that, in a power emergency, could be used to override customers’ temperature settings. Instead of making the proposal part of new state building requirements, the commissioners will discuss the use of the “programmable communicating thermostats” when considering how to manage electrical loads — with the understanding that customers would have the right to refuse to allow the state to override their wishes.
The mantra is repeated daily. There is consensus on climate change. Global warming is real. It will be a disaster. Humans are to blame. We have to do something – immediately.
From Joseph D'Aleo, CCM, ICECAP.us
Once again today we were told in the media that the antarctic ice is melting at an increasing and alarming rate. The story appeared in many papers including the Washington Post and the UK Globe Mail today based on a research project, led by Eric Rignot, principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and appearing in the current issue of Nature Geoscience. In an e-mail, Dr. Rignot attributed the shrinkage in the ice sheet to an upwelling of warm waters along the Antarctic coast, which is causing some glaciers to flow more rapidly into the ocean. He suspects the trend is due to global warming.
This seemed odd coming shortly after reports that the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) set a record for the MAXIMUM extent of ice since satellite monitoring began in 1979 this year. We thought we would take a look at the latest NSIDC graphs for southern hemispheric ice extent.
See full size image here
See full size image here
I will remind you it is mid-summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Ice extent remains well (one million square kilometers) above the 28 year average and an impressive 3 million square kilometers above last year at this time!. There is clearly a lot of year to year variability in the record but the demise of the Antartic icecap seems to be anything but imminent. Most of the warming and melt in recent years has been in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula, a small portion of the Antarctic which reaches above the Antarctic Circle and is a choke-point for the circumpolar ocean currents, and is more susceptible to variations. There’s also an active subsea volcano in the area, perhaps leading to the warm water upwelling in the study.
Huge energy price increases account for almost all of terrible new inflation numbers that came out yesterday, and federal lawmakers deserve much of the blame. The Labor Department said wholesale prices rose 6.3 percent in 2007, the largest jump in 26 years. “Core” inflation (excluding food and energy) rose just 2 percent, but a whopping 18.4 percent jump in energy prices pushed the overall rate sky-high.
I would never want to shoot a polar bear with anything more deadly than a tranquiliser dart. And yet I find myself on the side of Canadian Inuit in a stand-off with US greens on precisely that issue.
What will the world look like in a century? Imagine asking that question in 1900. And in 1800. The world would have changed in so many dramatic ways, that any economic and environmental predictions would have been worthless.
That’s the problem that we face with the climate doomsayers. They can spin out scenarios day after day, but there is little reason to believe the underlying economic and other assumptions.
So far the computer models have proved inadequate to the task. More research has come forth demonstrating that the models predict more warming than we have so far seen. If they can’t get the last three decades right, why does anyone believe that they will get multiple decades, or longer, in the future right?
Computer models that form the basis for future global warming predictions have projected significantly more warming in recent years than has actually occurred, concludes a comprehensive new scientific study.
“A Comparison of Tropical Temperature Trends with Model Predictions,” published in the December 2007 International Journal of Climatology, is the latest study to cast doubt on the efficacy of climate modeling. Climate scientists David H. Douglass, John Christy, and S. Fred Singer analyzed 22 climate models and found their predictions at odds with actual warming over the past 30 years.
No Human Fingerprint
Most of the models predicted significant middle- and upper-troposphere warming, yet actual warming was minimal.
Douglass and his colleagues write, “Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs.”
Christy, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributor, noted in a December 6 press statement, “Satellite data and independent balloon data agree that atmospheric warming trends do not exceed those of the surface. Greenhouse models, on the other hand, demand that atmospheric trend values be 2-3 times greater. Satellite observations suggest that greenhouse models ignore negative feedbacks, produced by clouds and by water vapor, that diminish the warming effects of carbon dioxide.”
Models Don’t Reflect Causes
Many top climate scientists point out climate models are incapable of handling confounding factors such as cloud cover and water vapor (the dominant greenhouse gas), thus distorting climate predictions.
Additionally, they note, the models do not reflect the actual causes of warming. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, says the models used by the IPCC and other alarmists assign too much warming resulting from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, rendering the models’ predictions inaccurate.
Singer writes, “Dire predictions of future warming are based almost entirely on computer climate models, yet these models do not accurately understand the role of water vapor. Plus, computer models cannot account for the observed cooling of much of the past century (1940-75), nor for the observed patterns of warming. For example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming. And where the models call for the middle atmosphere to warm faster than the surface, the observations show the exact opposite.”
The issue of climate change warrants continuing research. But there is no compelling reason for panic, jumping off an economic cliff to forestall a future unlikely to ever occur.
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