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Kelvin waves in the news

Elements of the 1997 Super El Niño seem to be repeating now in the Western Pacific
Dr. Ryan Maue is seeing hints of a beginning in ocean heat content satellite visualizations.

Maue writes on Twitter:

Quick look at 1997 TC Ocean Heat content anomaly for April 4 shows equatorial extreme + anoms … compare to 2014

A voice of reason at The Vancouver Sun

Opinion: Time to rein in the climate change carbon baggers
The World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank all continue to propagate a catastrophic scenario of future climate change. Can anyone forget the IMF’s Christine Lagarde’s infamous claim at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that if we don’t take action on climate change now, future generations will be “roasted, toasted, fried and grilled?”

One would think Lagarde — a lawyer by training, a profession founded on evidence — would not mislead billions of people in this immoral way. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has overstated the impact of carbon dioxide and the effect of human factors on climate change over the past 25 years, has never stooped this low.

Even NASA and the IPCC have acknowledged there has been a 16-plus year natural pause in global warming. Climate expert Roger Pielke presented evidence of no trend in extreme weather events to the U.S. senate committee on environment and public works in July.

So many roads lead to Chicago, climate change, carbon and Lagarde’s tenure at Baker and McKenzie, a Chicago law firm recognized “as one of the first global law firms to establish a climate-change practice.” U.S. President Barack Obama spent over six years as a board member of the Joyce Foundation that financed the founding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which eventually collapsed. The Joyce Foundation also funds TIDES and other ENGOs that loudly proclaim climate terror despite no scientific evidence.

But as Fox News reported in 2010, the collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange simply meant a strategy shift, as the Obama administration is pushing ahead with a piecemeal approach to instituting carbon taxes.

Climate carbon bagging is a lucrative business for the right people. In a power-point presentation from 2007, Baker McKenzie gave us an example: a Chinese plant sells its emissions credits; a private fund and the World Bank buy them, then resell them through “the IM process” and the World Bank, raising “$1.2 billion in 23 minutes.”

By contrast, the Financial Conduct Authority of the U.K. reported in September that not a single ordinary investor has made any money in carbon credits. Ordinary investors are not able to sell or trade carbon credits once acquired.

Lake Michigan

Ice-encrusted Michigan lighthouse photos: Meet the photographer behind the viral images
The lighthouses on Lake Michigan at St. Joseph and South Haven are famous round the world today, thanks to stunning photos of the structures encrusted in ice shot over the past few years by an Indiana photographer whose works are making the rounds on social networking this week.

"It's been unbelievable," said Thomas Zakowski, 56, of South Bend, a self-employed construction worker who has been shooting photos since he was a freshman in high school. "I've just been watching it unfold on the internet."

"Frozen in time: Michigan lighthouses transformed into stunning giant icicles after being frozen solid by storm" is the headline of the story by Simon Tomlinson in the MailOnline, an online publication of the United Kingdom updated at 11:01 a.m. Monday, Jan. 6.

Dealing with Climate Change Deniers

Just wonderful - snow forecast

Deja vu? Bellingham could get more snow this weekend
Just when you thought Bellingham should be due for a break from snow, it looks like we could get another dusting this weekend.

There's about a 40 percent chance of snowfall in the lowlands - an inch, maybe less - on Saturday morning, March 1, with the chances increasing as the weekend goes on, said Jay Neher, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Temperatures should sink to the high 20s each night. So the snow level would be near zero feet, Neher said. Sunday seems like the odds-on favorite day for more snow. A wintry mix of rain and snow is classified as "likely" Monday, too.

Great headline on this weather story

The Period Of No Global Warming Will Soon Be Longer Than the Period of Actual Global Warming
If you look at the record of global temperature data, you will find that the late 20th Century period of global warming actually lasted about 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Before that, the globe was dominated by about 30 years of global cooling, giving rise in the 1970s to media discussions of the return of the Little Ice Age (circa 1450 to 1850), or worse.

But the record of satellite measurements of global atmospheric temperatures now shows no warming for at least 17 years and 5 months, from September, 1996 to January, 2014, as shown on the accompanying graphic. That is surely 17 years and 6 months now, accounting for February.

When the period of no global warming began, the alarmist global warming establishment responded that even several years of temperature data does not establish a climate trend. That takes much longer. But when the period of no global warming gets longer than the period of actual global warming, what is the climate trend then?

A sharp pain in the heart

Looking at a graph of temperature

Think that we have it bad / Wonder where our water went?

Rostov-on-Don Crazy Blizzard
Rostov on Don (Rostov-na-Donu) is the tenth largest Russian city with a population of more than 1.1 million people. In the last few days people have reported massive snowfalls and blizzards in Rostov. As a result they say “city has gone medieval”, with shortages of food, fuel and electricity reported. The locals say cars can’t reach Rostov because the highways are closed and covered with snow. Here are some photos from the “sieged” town’s daily routines. The shot above demonstrates what an average person can see thru his bottom level window when he wakes up in the morning.

A debate on climate change

Not just the East coast -- the Midwest is going to freeze too

Next Polar Plunge Could Be Winter's Coldest
The next blast of brutal cold will grip most of the eastern two-thirds of the United States early this week and could yield the lowest temperatures so far this winter in many communities.

While harsh cold is returning to the Midwest and Northeast this weekend, it will pale in comparison to what will follow for Monday through Wednesday.

The magnitude of this cold blast will be enough to produce a far-reaching threat of frostbite, hypothermia, frozen pipes and water main breaks.

Care should also be taken to ensure that livestock and other animals housed outdoors have adequate shelter.

Especially across the Midwest and Northeast, officials may decide to cancel or delay school due to the extreme cold. Some vehicles may struggle or fail to start for motorists.

It's not just New York City and Pittsburgh.

Thailand: Cold Spell Exacerbates EMS Epidemic
Daniel Gruenberg reports: Record cold temperatures in Thailand have exacerbated the EMS epidemic, resulting in widespread emergency harvests (including a significant one at my farm).

I did a quick survey of hatchery managers, feed suppliers and processors that confirmed continued significant mortalities due to both EMS and WSSV in southern and eastern Thailand. A major feed mill reports that it’s only operating its mill two days a week, and processors report that they are operating at less than 20% of capacity.

Interestingly, I have heard countless reports of “cures” or fixes for EMS, and yet I have not been able to confirm that even one of them works. There still remains a paucity of good research on management strategies for EMS that’s based on good scientific methods, not just pseudo-science and rumors.

A Thai newspaper reports: On Thursday, January 23, 2014, “Bangkok hit its coldest record in 30 years when the temperature fell to 15.6º Celsius (60°F),” said Songkram Aksorn, Deputy Director General of the Thai Meteorological Department. This year’s cool season has been the longest for a decade, lasting for almost three months, Songkram said.

Not just Pittsburgh - New York City too

New York's East River Is Freezing Over
Extreme cold temperatures in New York City are taking their toll on transportation. Earlier this week, snow cancelled flights and slowed down the subway network. Now some ferry service is being suspended — because the East River is freezing over.

Global Warming in Pittsburgh, PA

Ice Jam Flooding Could Be Worst Area Has Seen In 2 Decades
Our three rivers are quickly becoming less flowing and more rock solid on the surface.

“We are seeing ice thickening of two to four inches overnight, and there are some places that have as much a six to eight inches of ice that has formed over the past several days,” said Joe Palko, a National Weather Service hydrologist meteorologist.

And despite a glint of sun Friday, there is no temperature change on the horizon significant enough to stop the growing miles of river from doing their glacial impression.

About the East coast weather - short memories

U.S. Mid-Atlantic Cleans Up From Snow; More Coming
Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia began digging out today from a blizzard that dumped as much as three feet of snow on parts of the mid-Atlantic region and left thousands without power.

Elkridge, Maryland, just south of Baltimore, recorded the region’s most snowfall with 38.3 inches (97 centimeters), the National Weather Service said. Baltimore’s airport had 24.8 inches, while Washington’s Reagan National had 17.8 inches, its second-biggest snowfall total. Philadelphia registered 28.5 inches, its second-biggest snowfall also. In the Virginia town of Howellsville, west of Washington, 37 inches fell.

Wheathur - a bad spell of weather

'La Nada' could mean big Northwest storms - or not
The weather in the Northwest this winter could be very bad – or not so much – because once again we’re in a neutral pattern – not an El Nino or La Nina.

The neutral, or “La Nada” event, has persisted since the spring of 2012 and models suggest this pattern will continue into the spring of 2014, according to scientists with the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center.

"Without an El Niño or La Niña signal present, other, less predictable, climatic factors will govern fall, winter and spring weather conditions," said climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Long-range forecasts are most successful during El Niño and La Niña episodes. The 'in between' ocean state, La Nada, is the dominant condition, and is frustrating for long-range forecasters. It's like driving without a decent road map -- it makes forecasting difficult."

What's to Blame for Wild Weather? "La Nada"
Record snowfall, killer tornadoes, devastating floods: There’s no doubt about it. Since Dec. 2010, the weather in the USA has been positively wild. But why?

Some recent news reports have attributed the phenomenon to an extreme "La Niña," a band of cold water stretching across the Pacific Ocean with global repercussions for climate and weather. But NASA climatologist Bill Patzert names a different suspect: "La Nada."

"La Niña was strong in December," he says. "But back in January it pulled a disappearing act and left us with nothing – La Nada – to constrain the jet stream. Like an unruly teenager, the jet stream took advantage of the newfound freedom--and the results were disastrous."

La Niña and El Niño are opposite extremes of a great Pacific oscillation. Every 2 to 7 years, surface waters across the equatorial Pacific warm up (El Niño) and then they cool down again (La Niña). Each condition has its own distinct effects on weather.

The winter of 2010 began with La Niña conditions taking hold. A "normal" La Niña would have pushed the jet stream northward, pushing cold arctic air (one of the ingredients of severe weather) away from the lower US. But this La Niña petered out quickly, and no El Niño rose up to replace it. The jet stream was free to misbehave.

"By mid-January 2011, La Niña weakened rapidly and by mid-February it was 'adios La Niña,' allowing the jet stream to meander wildly around the US. Consequently the weather pattern became dominated by strong outbreaks of frigid polar air, producing blizzards across the West, Upper Midwest, and northeast US."

What will Oregon's winter be like? It's a La Nada year, forecasters say
Want to know what the coming winter will be like?

You could get in a boat and travel thousands of miles west into the Pacific Ocean and take the ocean's temperature. Turns out, sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have a huge impact on not only weather in the Pacific Northwest, but across the U.S. and even globally.

Or you could go to the 21st annual Winter Weather Conference Saturday at OMSI, where three forecasters will make their three-month predictions for the upcoming winter.

The East Coast - a three-fer

Deep Freeze in Midwest, Northeast to Be Prolonged
Bitterly cold air is again settling southward from the Arctic into a large part of the Eastern states. Unlike the outbreak from early January, this time the cold will have more staying power.

Into the first part of next week, the polar vortex will hover just north of the United States border causing waves of frigid air to blast into the Midwest and much of the East.

Winter Storm That Hammers Northeast Cancels 4,400 Flights
Northeasterners scraped and shoveled Wednesday after a snowstorm grounded flights, shuttered schools and buried roads with a surprising amount of snow, leaving biting cold in its wake. The atmosphere was particularly frosty in New York, where some residents complained that plowing was spotty and schools were open while children elsewhere in the region stayed home.

De Blasio ‘getting back at us’ by not plowing: UES residents
It really is a tale of two cities — this time with the tony Upper East Side getting the shaft!

Huge swaths of the city’s wealthiest neighborhood had been not been plowed by early Tuesday evening, leaving 1-percenters out in the cold, according to the city’s own map of snow-plower activity.

“He is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political,” said writer and Life-long Upper East Sider and mom Molly Jong Fast of Mayor de Blasio.

“By not plowing the Upper East Side, he is saying, ‘I’m not one of them.’

The Ship of Fools

Warmists cut Turney adrift. And don’t mention he’s a professor of climate change, either
Sydney Morning Herald reporter Nicky Phillips is a warmist whose past reports on the Ship of Fools, which got stuck in Antarctic ice, failed to mention those on board had actually claimed to be studying global warming.

Today she and co-reporter Colin Cosier play the same trick again.

They have written a long report essentially blaming expedition leader Chris Turney for the expensive disaster, but once again fail to note the people trapped in ice were warmists out to prove man was melting it.

Phillips and Cosier fail to even report Turney’s academic title – Professor of Climate Change – or that he is an adjunct at the University of New South Wales’ Climate Change Research Centre. What makes this omission even stranger is that the Climate Change Research Centre, home of prominent climate alarmists such as professors Andy Pitman, Matthew England and Steve Sherwood, is listed as an official supporter of the expedition.

Get the impression that warmists are trying to distance themselves from this propaganda disaster, that has had sceptics around the world laughing?

Fun times for climate change - the BBC

BBC's six-year cover-up of secret 'green propaganda' training for top executives

• Pensioner forces BBC to lift veil on 2006 eco-seminar to top executives
• Papers reveal influence of top green campaigners including Greenpeace
• Then-head of news Helen Boaden said it impacted a 'broad range of output'
• Yet BBC has spent more than £20,000 in legal fees trying to keep it secret

The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting.

At the event, in 2006, green activists and scientists – one of whom believes climate change is a bigger danger than global nuclear war – lectured 28 of the Corporation’s most senior executives.

The BBC began its long legal battle to keep details of the conference secret after an amateur climate blogger spotted a passing reference to it in an official report.

Tony Newbery, 69, from North Wales, asked for further disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC’s resistance to revealing anything about its funding and the names of those present led to a protracted struggle in the Information Tribunal. The BBC has admitted it has spent more than £20,000 on barristers’ fees. However, the full cost of their legal battle is understood to be much higher.

How cold is it?

Heh...

Antarctica - now this is hilarious - Karma come calling

Rescue ship Aurora Australis slowed to a crawl – fighting heavy sea ice to reach open water

Australian Maritime Safety Authority Press release: 8.00am AEDT: 3rd January 2014
Antarctica rescue operation now complete
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC Australia) can confirm that the rescue operation from the Akademik Shokalskiy in Antarctica has been completed.

RCC Australia was notified at 6.15pm AEDT yesterday evening that the first group of 12 passengers had boarded the helicopter from the Xue Long at around 6pm AEDT. RCC Australia was then notified at 7.30pm AEST that the first 12 passengers had arrived at the Aurora Australis.

Five flights were conducted to take the passengers to the Aurora Australis over a distance of about 14 nautical miles. Four flights were undertaken with 12 people each flight, and the fifth flight rescued four passengers. The helicopter landed on an ice floe adjacent to the Aurora Australis.

At 10.05pm AEDT, AMSA was advised that all 52 passengers had been safely rescued and were on board the Aurora Australis.

Aurora Australis advised AMSA that helicopter operations had been completed at about 10.45pm AEDT and all passengers, luggage and equipment had been transferred.

The Aurora Australis will now start heading towards open water. The ship is currently traveling at a quarter knot in heavy ice towards open water. It will take until late evening to reach open water.

The Aurora Australis will then head towards the Casey base to complete a resupply before heading to Australia. The Aurora Australis is not expected to arrive in Australia until mid-January.

All 22 crew members of the Akademik Shokalskiy remain with the vessel.

From Andrew Bolt at the Melbourne Herald Sun:

1.Who paid for this expedition?
2.How did the expedition team come to include Turney’s wife and two young children?
3.How serious was this scientific endeavor?
4.Was the choice of ship wise, given it is not an icebreaker?
5.How did the ship, in these days of satellite imaging, high quality weather forecasts and radar, come to get stuck in ice?
6.How much did the rescue cost?
7.Who pays for this rescue?
8.Why have the ABC and Fairfax media, so keen at first to announce this expedition was to measure the extent and effects of global warming, since omitted that fact from their reports after the expedition became ice-bound?
9.Why have all those reports – and the expedition leader himself – neglected to mention that sea ice around Antarctica has increased over the past three decades – and is greater than the ice cover Douglas Mawson found a century ago?

And from Anthony:

I have these questions:

1.Who pays for the trip back to Australia once they get let off at Casey Station?
2.How much damage has this fiasco done to real science expeditions in Antarctica, not only from a delayed logistics standpoint, but also from PR standpoint?
3.Why did the stranded ship reach out for weather forecasts and data when they should have been equipped for this in the first place?
4.Who will be responsible if the ship ends up being stuck in ice permanently or gets its hull crushed and sinks?
5.What will be the duties and fate of the crew left behind? 6.Who funded the ARGO ATV’s after Turney’s Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign failed miserably? Do those people get a refund?
7.Why would Turney book this ship when it has only the barest of ratings for sea ice?

Lecture cancelled

Stick a fork in it - it is done

The Global Warming Tipping Point is Near
Malcolm Gladwell's great book The Tipping Point presents the case that sudden seismic shifts in society can result from small events, if the right factors are present. Tipping points happen when momentum toward an idea builds and finally crosses a threshold where it is evident that a major cultural change has occurred. The global warming tipping point is coming, but not the one anticipated by climate change "experts."

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory has been dominant for the past three decades as absolute fact in the public mind. In the last several years, however, cracks in the fortress of "settled science" have appeared, and public opinion has begun to shift. Increasingly, alarmist predictions have failed to come to fruition.

In 2004, NASA's chief scientist James Hansen authoritatively announced 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. Well, that window has now shut tight, and AGW is AWOL.

Al Gore, the high priest of AGW theory, has closed all of his Alliance for Climate Protection field offices, and laid off 90% of his staff. Contributions have all but dried up since 2008.

Australia's conservative government has severely curtailed the country's climate change initiatives and is in the process of repealing its business-killing carbon tax. A group of German scientists predicts dramatic global cooling over the next 90 years toward a new "little ice age."

Of course, even many "low information" folks have an awareness of the record increase in Arctic sea ice, as well as the current highly-publicized predicament of the cadre of wealthy global warmists stuck in record-high sea ice while on a cruise to the Antarctic to prove the absence of sea ice.

Now the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quietly downgraded their prediction for global warming for the next 30 years in the final draft of their landmark "Fifth Assessment Report." The effect of this is that they are tacitly admitting that the computer models they have religiously relied-upon for decades as "proof" of AGW theory are dead wrong.
The tipping point is near. I can smell it.

Antarctic Ice - a question from the ship lands in Anthony's lap

WUWT and WeatherBell help KUSI-TV with a weather forecasting request from ice-trapped ship in Antarctica Akademik Shokalskiy
Today, while shopping at lunchtime for some last minute year end supplies, I got one of the strangest cell-phone calls ever. It was from my friend John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel and Chief meteorologist at KUSI-TV in San Diego. He was calling via cell phone from his car, and he was on his way into the TV station early.

He started off by saying, “Anthony, we have a really strange situation here”.

Then to my surprise, he relayed a conversation he had just had; a person on the Akademik Shokalskiy had reached out, because they didn’t have adequate weather data on-board. At first, I thought John was pulling my leg, but then as he gave more details, I realized he was serious.

What had happened was that the US Coast Guard had received a message from the ship, requesting weather and wind information for Antarctica. That got relayed to someone at the Scripps oceanographic Institute in San Diego, and it went to John’s weekend KUSI meteorologist Dave Scott. Dave had worked with a scientist who is now on the US Coast Guard IceBreaker Polar Star, and they had logged the request for weather for forecast data from Akademik Shokalskiy. That’s how all this got started.

I also pointed out that the Australian scientists on-board were climatologists, and not operational weather forecasters, and finding this sort of weather data probably wasn’t in their skill set.

Antarctic ice - another update (UPDATE again)

One related question remains worth noting, however: Where is the South Pole?

Prince Harry supposedly reached the South Pole earlier this month, but debate later broke out about the multiple—three, to be exact—South Poles in the area.

Why is this the case? Let's remember, the South Pole is essentially on a huge chunk of ice, which means the continent of Antarctica is constantly shifting around and moving.

Throw in global warming and ocean currents and you've got the recipe for a South Pole that moves about 33 feet (10 meters) per year.

Then there's the idea of a magnetic South Pole, which also isn't exactly steady, as it's been shown to move northward toward Australia about six to nine miles (10 to 15 kilometers) per year.

Looking for a South Pole that doesn't move? Check out the trustworthy ceremonial South Pole. And while you're at it, you can even take a photo there.

About that global warming - Antarctic ice UPDATE

Only at the South Pole: Icebreaker also stuck -- in ice -- heading for stranded ship
South Pole weather has stymied a rescue by a Chinese icebreaker trying to reach an expedition vessel trapped for the past four days in frozen seas, a ship officer told CNN Friday.

The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, was just six nautical miles away from the rescue, but now it's stuck in an Antarctica ice floe, too.

The Chinese crew is hoping a French icebreaker 14 nautical miles away will arrive and offer relief, said Zhu Li, chief officer of the Chinese ship.

But it's likely the French vessel Astrolabe will also be slowed by the polar cap's extreme frigidity, Zhu said.

Those two icebreakers -- plus a third, from Australia -- were battling the planet's coldest environment in trying to reach the stranded Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy, whose 74 researchers, crew and tourists remained in good condition despite being at a frozen standstill since Monday.

A mite nippy outside

Welcome to the frozone
Extreme negative temperatures out-number extreme positive temperatures on the planet today, with a spread of over 100ºC. Eagle airport in upper Alaska on the Yukon River is one such example.

Unseasonable weather

Ice free in five to seven years

It's 1977 all over again

About that global warming - preparing for the colder future to come

Washington, Alaska senators pave way for 4 new icebreakers
The four U.S. senators from Washington and Alaska are seeking to authorize construction of as many as four new heavy-duty icebreakers, vastly expanding the Coast Guard’s beleaguered Seattle-based icebreaker fleet.

But with a price tag of $850 million or more per vessel, the odds of Congress going along seem about as good as a snowball’s chance in the warming polar climate.

The amendment to the 2014 Defense Authorization Act would allow the Navy to immediately sign multiyear contracts to procure the icebreakers and related systems. The Navy then would transfer the vessels to the Coast Guard, which operates and maintains the current fleet of three icebreakers, one of which is inactive.

That language was inserted by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who has long pushed to expand the nation’s capabilities to deal with commercial and scientific exploration opening in the melting Arctic regions.

The polar north is increasingly becoming a battle ground among China, Russia and other nations eager to tap its deep reserves of oil and gas. That changing geopolitical reality prompted the Pentagon last week to issue its first Arctic Strategy to protect American national interests.

About that Global Warming

Storm to Cause Major Thanksgiving Travel Chaos Wednesday
A major storm with heavy snow, rain and high winds will hit Thanksgiving travelers hard on Wednesday in the Northeast with ripple effects for flights elsewhere in the nation.

The timing of the storm could not come at a worst time with AAA projecting 43.4 million travelers during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

About those polar bear attacks in Vermont

Seeing climate change for what it is

Climate Change Alarm Is A U.N. Extortion Racket
Shakedown: Reports out of Warsaw, Poland, say that 132 nations walked out of the United Nations climate conference Wednesday. Are they upset over global warming? No, they just want more money from rich countries.

As the U.N. Conference of the Parties droned on toward the end of its two-week meeting, "representatives of most of the world's poor countries" staged a walkout, the British Guardian said, over a "compensation row."

More specifically, they quit because they felt the rich countries weren't pouring enough money into their treasuries — from where it typically ends up in the hands of a kleptocratic ruling class.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not exist to save the planet, foster environmental sustainability or protect man from himself.

The IPCC exists to move wealth from rich countries that earned it through free or almost-free markets to poor nations that can't reach prosperity because their governments are run by socialists, statists and assorted tyrants.

Of course the IPCC exists in part to provide top-dollar jobs, and positions of influence and power for political functionaries and the well-connected who aid them.

But such a group needs a "mission" to justify its being.

But one wealthy nation's government actually gets it.

Australia's representatives have treated the U.N. meeting with the irreverence and contempt that it so richly deserves. We wish others, including our own, would act as rationally.

Bad weather in the Midwest

Developing: Tornadoes Sweep Through Midwest, NFL Game Suspended
Severe weather, including intense thunderstorms and tornadoes, swept across the Midwest Sunday appearing to level at least part of one town and forcing the temporary suspension of the Chicago Bears game.

The National Weather Service has confirmed several tornadoes have touched down in Illinois.

A Washington, Illinois spokesperson told the Weather Channel that “several neighborhoods [have been] damaged” and “many homes flattened.” According to the spokesperson, “several minor injuries” have been reported thus far, but “no fatalities.”

“Red Cross is working with the county is [sic] opening up shelters tonight…for those affected,” the spokesperson added.

Severe weather likely to hit plains today
Particularly Dangerous Situation Tornado Watch in effect until 4:00 PM CST this afternoon for portions of eastern Iowa, Illinois, northwest Indiana, northeast Missouri, southeast Wisconsin, and Lake Michigan. For additional details, please see http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/watch/ww0561.html.

You can bet that if there are tornadoes produced from this we’ll see claims along the lines that “tornadoes in November are unusual” (They aren’t, see graph below) and that this is another “signature of global warming” (the science shows it isn’t, see IPCC SREX report).

Typhoon Haiyan - an observation

Deploy Resources on Forecast, NOT on Disaster
Haiyan represents another human tragedy caused by severe weather. And it highlights again the weakness in the way mankind responds to such disasters.

Days before Haiyan's landfall, the forecast models showed the threat. Uncertainty was low as the best models honed in on the solution. Some warnings went out, but the major players waited until death and destruction occurred before initiating a major response. The storm hit, victims were injured and desperate, and help did not begin arriving in force until 3-5 days after the event. Many die, others sicken, looting begins, and the situation deteriorates until the second week after the storm.

Sounds familiar? This kind of scenario is SO familiar, from Katrina to Haiyan and a many storms in between.

We can do much better. Mankind, and particularly the U.S., needs to deploy on forecast, not deploy on disaster. We can do this now for the simple reason that weather forecasts are hugely better than even a decade ago. Sandy was a good example of our increased prediction prowess, and there are many more. So why begin to deploy relief AFTER the disaster strikes, but before? And have the capability to move in with massive resources immediately after the storm passes.

Four swivel-headed loons

Climate change pact signed by California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia
Saying that the West Coast must lead the way in battling climate change, the governors of California, Oregon and Washington, along with a representative of the premier of British Columbia, signed an agreement Monday committing the Canadian province and the three states to coordinate global-warming policies.

Each state and the Canadian province promised to take roughly a dozen actions, including streamlining permits for solar and wind projects, better integrating the electric power grid, supporting more research on ocean acidification and expanding government purchases of electric vehicles.

"You are witnessing a historic small-but-powerful first step," California Gov. Jerry Brown said during the event, held at Cisco's San Francisco campus.

"It's only the beginning. You just watch," Brown said. "Next year and the year after and the year after that, this will spread until finally we get a real handle and grasp on what is the world's greatest existential challenge -- the stability of our climate, on which we all depend."

A eulogy for Climate Change

Friday Funny – A Tribute to the Life of Climate Change
Perhaps Dana Nuccitelli and others can’t come to terms with the death of the AGW hypothesis because Climate Change hasn’t been properly eulogized. Maya Angelou once wrote; “I can accept the idea of my own demise, but I am unable to accept the death of anyone else. I find it impossible to let a friend or relative go into that country of no return. Disbelief becomes my close companion, and anger often follows in its wake.”

I fear Dana likewise is likewise suffering from the denial and anger that follows the loss of a loved one. To that end, I offer these words to try to bring some comfort and closure to him and his friends who are tormented by the loss of their dear friend and long-time companion.

I never had the opportunity to meet Climate Change personally;

however he had many friends, and they spoke of him frequently – so frequently that at times, I thought they wanted me to know him better than I know my own family. And while I never came to know and appreciate Climate Change the way they did, he did bring me many laughs over the years.

Climate change had a difficult childhood. His father was a relentlessly self-promoting civil servant from Iowa and his mother was an elderly French prostitute named Lia. She was not the perfect mother; she would drink. She would make outrageous claims like she invented the internet. Sometimes, she would accuse bushes of being corrupt. The sort of general mendacity that only the self-proclaimed genius possess and the skeptical lament. She spent all her time in pursuit of riches; never did she lift a finger to help Climate Change. His friends did their best to help him deal with the pain of his youth; so dedicated was one man, that he even tried to convince the world that Lia never even existed.

As a boy, Climate Change kept mostly to himself and was not the larger-than-life figure we have come to know in recent years. Certainly no one would have guessed that he would go on to found one of the largest religions of our time. You might say his childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon , luge lessons. In the spring, he made meat helmets, pretty standard, really.

He first gained notoriety when thrust unwillingly into the spotlight by those who would later become friends of his mother. They wanted everyone to believe that it was he who was cold and heartless; though now these proselytes deny any part in it. I can still remember seeing him as a young man on the cover of Time magazine; the “Big Freeze” they called him. A chilling life was not his destiny however, and soon his future was as bright as an active sun – so bright that even the Hollywood A-list would seek out his warmth. In time, he came to be known as Global Warming.

New York City Subways and Hurricane Sandy

Could New York City Subways Survive Another Hurricane?
A good place to see how and why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority just barely survived Sandy last fall is the entrance to a tunnel at 148th Street and Lenox Avenue, in East Harlem, where, just before the storm hit, a crew of carpenters built a plywood dam 8½ feet tall by about 55 feet wide. That ad hoc, low-tech, last-minute construction held the New York Harbor at bay and not only saved the city hundreds of millions of dollars, but also made it possible for the subway to come back to life as quickly as it did.

The first work on the dam began a week before Sandy arrived, when building materials were taken to the site. As weather forecasters were hemming and hawing about European versus American climate models and Mayor Bloomberg was debating whether to evacuate flood areas, New York City Transit was working on its own hurricane plans. “You scramble your jets right away — you can’t wait,” says Thomas F. Prendergast, president of New York City Transit at the time and now the authority’s chairman and chief executive. The reports on the dam that he was getting at the Rail Control Center in Midtown showed the level getting higher and higher. “The water was lapping at the top,” he says.

Not long after Sandy was categorized a tropical depression off the coast of Venezuela on Friday, Oct. 19, the M.T.A. had begun gathering cots and bedding, food and water, for track workers and hydraulics teams and even the train crews that would shut the system down and start it back up. Carpenters and bus drivers alike would be staying at depots and temporary shelters, because there would be no way for them to go home and then return to work while the subways and regional trains like Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit were out. By Wednesday, when Sandy crossed the island of Jamaica as a Category 1 hurricane, carpenters were covering sidewalk subway grates with plastic sheeting and plywood and building barriers at the entrances of low-lying subway stations, mostly in Lower Manhattan.

Color me surprised - LA Times and climate "skeptics"

LA Times bans letters from climate skeptics
The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics.

Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.

“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” Thornton wrote. “Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”

What amounts to a ban on discourse about climate change stirred outrage among scientists who have written exactly that sort of letter.

"In a word, the LA Times should be ashamed of itself," William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton, told FoxNews.com.

Al Gore v/s reality

New Study: ’2013 ranks as one of the least extreme U.S. weather years ever’– Many bad weather events at ‘historically low levels’
There have been many forecasts in the news in recent years predicting more and more extreme weather-related events in the US, but for 2013 that prediction has been way off the mark. Whether you’re talking about tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat or hurricanes, the good news is that weather-related disasters in the US are all way down this year compared to recent years and, in some cases, down to historically low levels.

To begin with, the number of tornadoes in the US this year is on pace to be the lowest total since 2000 and it may turn out to be the lowest total in several decades. The table below lists the number of tornadoes in the US for this year (through 10/17) and also for each year going back to 2000.
(Source: NOAA, http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/online/monthly/newm.html)

Gore Says U.S. Likely to Beat ‘Inadequate’ Carbon Target
The U.S. will probably beat its own target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions as the costs of wind and solar power fall and coal becomes inviable, former Vice President Al Gore said.

Gore said the fingerprints of man-made climate change are now increasingly visible in extreme weather events, fueled by a warmer atmosphere that retains more moisture. He pointed to Hurricane Sandy, which caused insured losses of about $25 billion when it hit the U.S. East Coast last year, as well as drought that cut U.S. crop yields.

“The most powerful voice is that of Mother Nature, the increasing storms, floods, droughts and other extreme events,” Gore said. “We’re paying the cost of carbon every day and we should put a price on carbon in markets and put a price on denial in the political system.”

The Idée fixe of Global Warming on college campuses

The Wannabe Oppressed
What do America’s college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely, a surprising number of students at America’s finest colleges and universities wish to appear as victims — to themselves, as well as to others — without the discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class, at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, “I’ll save you.” Yet deep down they’re thinking, “Oppress me.”

In his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed Marxism. (You can find Bruckner’s excellent article based on the book here.) Bruckner describes a historical process wherein “the long list of emblematic victims — Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples — was replaced, little by little, with the Planet.” The planet, says Bruckner, “has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation.”

An idée fixe is a preoccupation of mind held so firmly as to resist any attempt to modify it, a fixation. The name originates from the French [French : idée, idea + fixe, fixed]. Although not used technically to denote a particular disorder in psychology, idée fixe is used often in the description of disorders, and is employed widely in literature and everyday English.

Crap - our prayers go out to the people of India

Category 4 Cyclone Phailin Hits India; 13 Dead in Philippines From Typhoon Nari
Very dangerous Tropical Cyclone Phailin has made landfall on the northeast coast of India near the town of Gopalpur (population 7,000) at 16 UTC (noon EDT) Saturday, October 12, 2013. Phailin was weakening substantially at landfall, due to interaction with land, and was rated a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC), four hours before landfall. The pressure bottomed out at 938 mb in Gopalpur as the eye passed over, and the city reported sustained winds of 56 mph, gusting to 85 mph, in the eyewall. A 938 mb pressure is what one expects to find in a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds, using the "Dvorak technique" of satellite wind and pressure estimation. Satellite images show that Phailin's intense thunderstorms have warmed and shrunk in areal coverage, and radar out of Visakhapanam, India also shows a weakening of the storm's echoes as it pushes inland. Phailin is bringing torrential rains of over an inch per hour, as estimated by microwave satellite instruments.

Phailin is the strongest tropical cyclone to affect India in fourteen years, since the great 1999 Odisha Cyclone. That storm hit with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, and brought a storm surge of 5.9 meters (19 feet) to the coast. Phailin should be able to drive a similar-sized storm surge to the coast, since it is larger in areal extent than the 1999 cyclone (although somewhat weaker, with winds perhaps 20 - 30 mph lower.) Phailin's storm surge and Category 3 to 4 winds will cause near-catastrophic damage to a 50-mile wide swath of the coast where the eyewall comes ashore, and to the right. Hurricane Katrina was weaker at landfall than Phailin, but Katrina had hurricane-force winds that covered a much larger area, making Katrina's storm surge much more devastating than Phailin's will be. I think the main danger from Phailin will be from its winds. I am particularly concerned about Phailin's wind damage potential in the city of Brahmapur (population 350,000), the 58th largest city in India. Brahmapur lies about ten miles inland, and will likely experience sustained hurricane-force winds for several hours. Phailin's flooding potential is another huge concern, as rainfall amounts of 6 - 12 inches will fall along a swath over 100 miles inland, triggering life-threatening flash flooding.

Typhoon Nari hits the Philippines
Thirteen people were killed and 2.1 million people lost power on the main Philippine island of Luzon after Typhoon Nari hit on Friday night near midnight local time. Nari was a Category 3 typhoon with 115 mph winds a few hours before landfall. The core of the storm passed about 80 miles north of the capital of Manila, sparing the capital major flooding, but the storm dumped torrential rains in excess of ten inches to the northeast of Manilla. Passage over Luzon weakened Nari to a Category 1 storm, but it is already beginning to re-organize over the South China Sea between the Philippines and Vietnam. Nari is under moderate wind shear of 15 - 20 knots, which should keep intensification relatively slow, and increasing interaction with land will act to slow intensification on Sunday and Monday. Nari could be near Category 3 strength with 115 mph winds by Monday, and landfall in Vietnam is expected around 21 UTC on Monday.

Typhoon Wipha a threat to Japan
Category 1 Typhoon Wipha is intensifying as it heads northwest towards Japan, and the storm is expected to reach major Category 3 strength by Monday. By Tuesday, Wipha will recurve to the northeast and begin weakening, passing very close to Tokyo, Japan, sometime between 00 - 12 UTC on Wednesday. High winds and heavy rains from Wipha may be a concern for the Fukushima nuclear site, where workers continue to struggle with high radiation levels in the wake of the 2011 tsunami that damaged the reactors.

And another celebrity jumps the shark on Global Warming

'We’re facing a mass extinction event,' claims Bob Geldof
“The world can decide in a fit of madness to kill itself,” announced Bob Geldof at the launch of the One Young World summit in Johannesburg. “Sometimes progress may not be possible.

“We're in a very fraught time,” he added. “There will be a mass extinction event. That could happen on your watch.

“The signs are that it will happen and soon.”

Sir Bob, wearing his trademark sunglasses, addressed 8,000 One Young World delegates from 190 nations across the world in Soccer City, Johannesburg last night. He is a counsellor for the organisation, which hopes to inspire and create the next generation of global leaders.

Liberals hunkering down

Liberal media huddles to re-hype global warming
The liberal media is scrambling to figure out if they are under-reporting the seriousness of global warming.

Journalists from left-leaning news sites are meeting in Chattanooga, Tenn., to discuss whether or not they have “blown it” when it comes to global warming coverage and how they can better portray the seriousness of the issue.

The Society of Environmental Journalists will be hosting a meeting on Friday that will discuss the media coverage surrounding global warming, which will include a panel of journalists from left-leaning news sites.

The panel will include: Daniel Grossman, contributing editor, National Geographic News Watch; Katherine Bagley with InsideClimate News; Peter Dykstra with Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate; Joseph Romm with ClimateProgress.org and the chief science editor of the Showtime TV series, “Years of Living Dangerously.”

More than half-way there

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The missing hurricanes

What happened to hurricane season? And why we should keep forecasting it…
As we wrap up September, there have been just two short-lived Category 1 hurricanes in the Atlantic. Yet seasonal forecasts predicted an extremely active season. What’s going on?

Before diving into the seasonal forecasts, let’s take inventory on where the season stands.

In an average season, 8 tropical storms, 4 hurricanes, and 1 major (category 3 or higher) hurricane form by this date. This year, we’ve experienced 10 tropical storms, 2 hurricanes, and no major hurricanes.

Though we’ve had close to the average number of total storms, most have been short-lived and/or weak. If you went out for a cup of coffee at any time this hurricane season, you would’ve missed many of them.

Waethur - the worst spell of weather in a long time

Brief Post Mortem
There were branches and even some trees down on the Burke Gilman bike trail this morning...so I knew something had happened. Here is a summary of the strongest winds over the past 24 hr. Big winds (70-90 mph) at some exposed mountain locations (they call it Hurricane Ridge for a reason!). Lots of 30-45 mph gusts in the lowlands and 50-70 mph along the coast.

The 48-h total precipitation ending 11:48 PM last night from Seattle Rainwatch shows the big differences over the lowlands (this is not valid over the mountains or south of Olympia). Some locations got to 5 inches or more. And there was a well-defined rainshadow NE of the Olympics.

David Suzuki visits Australia - shows himself to be ignorant of what he speaks

Suzuki revealed as complete know-nothing by very first question on Q&A
Oh. My. God.

David Suzuki on the very first question is revealed as a complete know-nothing. His questioner tells him that the main climate data sets show no real warming for some 15 years.

Suzuki asks for the references, which he should have known if he knew anything of the science.

His questioner then lists them: UAH, RSS, HadCrut and GISS - four of the most basic measurement systems of global temperature.

Suzuki asks what they are.

Anyone interested in global warming should know right there that Suzuki has absolutely no understanding of what he is talking about.

In my opinion he is a phony.

Great news from Hong Kong

Typhoon Usagi made landfall near Shanwei, China, about 90 miles east-northeast of Hong Kong, near 6 pm local time (6 am EDT) on Sunday. At landfall, Usagi--the Japanese word for rabbit--was a powerful Category 2 typhoon with top sustained winds of 110 mph. Shanwei recorded a sea level pressure of about 941 mb at landfall. As of noon EDT, the top winds recorded at the Hong Hong Airport were sustained at 40 mph, with gusts to 53 mph. Hong Kong's Cheung Chau Island recorded sustained winds of 54 mph, gusting to 76 mph. Since the typhoon made landfall well to the east of the city, Hong Kong was on the weaker (left) side of the storm, and missed Usagi's strongest winds and most significant storm surge. Hong Kong had a 0.7 meter (2.3') storm surge at the Kwai Chung measurement site. Shantou, located on the strong (right) side of the storm, experienced sustained winds of 49 mph, gusting to 67 mph. Two people were killed by a falling tree in China near Usagi's landfall location, and the typhoon is also being blamed for two deaths in the Philippines and nine injuries in Taiwan. Satellite images show that Usagi is weakening quickly as it moves inland, and the storm should dissipate over China by Tuesday morning.

Usagi update

Powerful typhoon hits Taiwan, Philippines
The most powerful typhoon of the year swept through the Luzon Strait separating the Philippines and Taiwan on Saturday, battering island communities and dumping rain as it eyes landfall in Hong Kong.

Super Typhoon Usagi had maximum sustained winds of 139 mph and gusts exceeding 163 mph Saturday morning, and was 550 kilometers south of Taipei, Taiwan's capital, according to the U.S. Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center. A storm achieves super typhoon status when winds reach 150 mph.

The U.S. Navy's warning center predicted that Usagi will approach Hong Kong with weaker but dangerous sustained winds of 110 mph early Monday morning, while the Hong Kong Observatory hoisted the No. 1 Standby Signal and warned the storm poses a "severe threat" to the city.

Climate cycles

Ancient trees emerge from frozen forest 'tomb'
The Mendenhall Glacier’s recession is unveiling the remains of ancient forests that have remained frozen beneath the ice for up to 2,350 years.

UAS Professor of Geology and Environmental Science Program Coordinator Cathy Connor said she and others have been tracking the emergence of the forests’ remains. Some stumps and logs can be found in the moraines around the west side of the glacier. Some remain vertical, frozen to the ground in ice caves. Some are scoured smooth; some still have their bark. All are packed with silt in the outer layers.

The most recent stumps she’s dated emerging from the Mendenhall are between 1,400 and 1,200 years old. The oldest she’s tested are around 2,350 years old. She’s also dated some at around 1,870 to 2,000 years old.

“We’re seeing the Mendenhall wax and wane through time a little bit,” Connor said.

Fun times in Hong Kong

Usagi (Northwestern Pacific Ocean)
The most powerful typhoon of 2013 was passing between northern Philippines and southern Taiwan on Sept. 19. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Usagi, infrared data showed a large area of powerful thunderstorms and heavy rain surrounding the center while NASA's TRMM satellite measured that heavy rainfall from space.

Super-Typhoon Usagi is a monster storm that according the Joint Typhoon Warning Center is headed for a landfall near Hong Kong on Sept. 22 around 1200 UTC/8 a.m. EDT/8 p.m. local time Hong Kong.

Usagi formed in the open waters of the Philippine Sea about 1,000 km/~620 miles east of the Philippines on September 16, 2013. Usagi rapidly intensified and became a typhoon on Sept. 18 and a Super Typhoon on Sept. 19 when it had estimated maximum winds of close to 140 knots/~161 mph.

Our quiet sun

Solar activity drops to 100-year low, puzzling scientists
Predictions that 2013 would see an upsurge in solar activity and geomagnetic storms disrupting power grids and communications systems have proved to be a false alarm. Instead, the current peak in the solar cycle is the weakest for a century.

Subdued solar activity has prompted controversial comparisons with the Maunder Minimum, which occurred between 1645 and 1715, when a prolonged absence of sunspots and other indicators of solar activity coincided with the coldest period in the last millennium.

The comparisons have sparked a furious exchange of views between observers who believe the planet could be on the brink of another period of cooling, and scientists who insist there is no evidence that temperatures are about to fall.

New Scientist magazine blasted those who predicted a mini ice age, opening a recent article on the surprising lack of sunspots this year with the bold declaration: "Those hoping that the sun could save us from climate change look set for disappointment".

Yeah - but it rains a lot!

Secret Revealed: The Northwest Has the Best Summer in the Nation. But Why?
The secret is out.

A few days ago, a well known ratings group found Seattle to be the NUMBER ONE city in the U.S. for pleasant summer weather, while Portland followed in second place. Even major newspapers like the Los Angeles Times seem to agree. A table from the authoritative Sperling report says it all (see below). With comfortable average highs in the mid-70s, sleep-friendly lows in the lower fifties, and low dew points and relative humidities, Seattle is meteorological heaven during the summer months.

Obama's accelerated global warming

Ten years of ‘accelerated global warming’?
During the July 2013 U.S. Senate hearing at which Roger Pielke Jr. and Roy Spencer gave stellar testimony to the visible discomfiture of the climate-extremist witnesses, none of the “Democrat” Senators and none of the people they had chosen to testify before them was at all anxious to defend Mr. Obama’s assertion that over the past decade global warming has been accelerating at an unforeseen rate.

At a fund-raiser for the “Democratic” Congressional Campaign Committee in Chicago May 29, he had said, “We … know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or ten years ago.” He had added, “I don’t have much patience for people who deny climate change.”

Well, I deny that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or ten years ago. But I deny it not because I take an aprioristic position opposite to Mr Obama’s aprioristic position, but because science is done by measurement, not by parroting the Party Line. And the measurements do not support the Party Line.

The lower bound of the orange zone is the IPCC’s low-end projection. Warming should be occurring at a minimum of 1.33 Cº/century. The thick bright red line is the IPCC’s mid-range projection: warming should be occurring at 2.33 Cº/century.

The real-world trend, represented by the thick bright blue trend line, shows global temperatures declining since January 2005 at a rate equivalent to almost a quarter of a Celsius degree (half a Fahrenheit degree) per century.

You may think that going to the trouble of producing so many graphs is overkill. Yet when I first spoke up at the U.N. climate conference in Doha and pointed out that there had been no global warming for 16 years the delegates were furious. So were the news media. One reason for their unreason: they simply did not know the facts.

One would have thought that among all the hours of hand-wringing on the air and pages of moaning in print about “global warming”, most of the news media would be faithfully reporting the monthly temperature anomalies. But no. The facts do not fit the Party Line, so they are not reported. They are consigned to the Memory Hole.

As for Mr. Obama’s statement about “acceleration”, he was plain wrong. Instead of the warming equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century global warming that had been “anticipated”, there has really been no change in global temperature at all over the past five or ten years.

Will somebody tell the “President”?

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
--Sir Peter Medawar

Now this will be an interesting read

Highly Controversial German Climate Book To Appear Worldwide In English September 1st
Amazon is now showing that Fritz Vahrenholt’s and Sebastian Lüning’s controversial book Die kalte Sonne (The cold sun), released in German last year, is now coming out worldwide in English.

The title of the English version: The Neglected Sun, and the publisher is Stacey International in London.

Their book created quite a stir in Europe, especially in Germany. The warmist establishment pretty much had seizures over it.

Fritz Vahrenholt, chemistry professor, is also the author of the 1986 book “Seveso ist überall” (Seveso is everywhere), a book on the deadly risks of chemical pollution. That book made him one of the fathers of Germany’s modern environmental movement. Until just a couple of years ago Vahrenholt was a big believer in anthropogenic global warming, and accepted the IPCC gloomy reports as the final word on the subject – until one day he began taking a closer look at the real data. He couldn’t believe some of the shenanigans going on in the science, and so together with geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning, he co-authored Die kalte Sonne.

Despite a massive orchestrated campaign by environmental activists against Die kalte Sonne, it soared to No. 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list. That success has obviously served as the springboard to the English edition. Now it’s going to be hitting bookshelves worldwide.

According to Amazon, the book will be available on September 1 and it can already be pre-ordered. Interestingly its release is right before the IPCC’s 5th assessment report. Talk about timing. The Neglected Sun can be pre-ordered at any bookshop.

The flooding in Calgary

CodeTech says:
Wayne Delbeke has mentioned the floods in Calgary, and linked to a (horribly biased and uninformed) news item about it.

Here’s the deal: there’s no “horrible floods” in Calgary. This city has two rivers flowing in, they join, and a single one flows out. Both are high from spring runoff from the mountains. As most WUWT readers know, there was a LOT of snow in the mountains this year, and it’s a higher than usual amount (not uncommonly high, but above average). Couple that with a storm system that spun in from Montana, and you get flooding. It’s not even catastrophic, although if you watch the news you’d think it is.

Our biggest problem is that we have a politically naïve and currently unpopular mayor looking to score brownie points and hoping to win the next election, hence the pro-active and largely unnecessary evacuations. Now, instead of being able to man their sump pumps and keep an eye on their property, homeowners are being forced away, the power shut off, and police and fire are watching the waters rise.

We had a similar flood in 2005, that did not require evacuations, and I predict that when this is all over the forced removal of residents from their potentially waterlogged basements is going to seriously hurt the city emergency handlers. Also another similar flood in 1995, and 1989, 1988, a few in the 70s, and so on back in time.

Meanwhile, while I was attempting to explain this on the CNN news item (yes, we made CNN…. and if you think the CBC news item got it wrong, CNN and FoxNews both have them beat by a lot!) but apparently CNN is only interested in blocking any comment that could possibly lead someone to believe that this has nothing to do with “climate change”. But hey, it’s mostly what I expect from the mainstream media. They don’t get it right, and their “fact checking” could barely be more lackadaisical.

So, anyone wondering how Calgary is doing, we’re fine. Less than 10% of the city was forced out of their homes at a time they most need to watch over them, but the vast majority of those homes are not in danger.

(I live on a lake, 100 feet above river level, because I’m not stupid enough to build on a floodplain)

Calgary mayor to flood evacuees: 'Gather your valuables and go'
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi is urging residents affected by flooding evacuation orders to "gather your valuables and go," while telling the city as a whole to avoid all non-essential travel on Friday.

"The message tonight is that we are still expecting that the worst has not yet come in terms of the flow," Nenshi told CBC News early Friday in a telephone interview from an emergency operations centre. "The dams will crest on both the Bow and Elbow river over the course of the next little while and the downstream impacts will be significant.

"If you live in any of the neighbourhoods that have now been affected by the mandatory evacuation it is time to leave. Gather your valuables and go," said Nenshi, who returned early from an economic development trip in Ontario to deal with the flooding response.

The benefits of Global Warming

Global Savings: Billion-Dollar Weather Events Averted by Global Warming
Last week, the government’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) finalized its list of “Billion Dollar Weather/Climate Disasters” for 2012. They reported 11 such events with the combined loss exceeding $110 billion, making it the second costliest year since their compilation began in 1980.

Since the number of billion dollar weather disasters has been increasing over time, the temptation to point a finger at anthropogenic global warming is too great for many global warming addicts to resist, despite the known problems with the list (for example, the lack of proper accounting for changing population demographics — a factor which explains virtually all of the increase).

It seems folks are extremely creative at coming up with reasons why virtually every weather disaster is “consistent with” human-caused climate change and how things will get worse in the future. However, such creativity evaporates when trying to come up with any positive weather/climate effects that are “consistent with” anthropogenic climate change.

To see this creativity/lack thereof in action, go read a few pages of the latest version of the government’s report from the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee. Or, to save some time, you can pursue my (and colleagues) comments on the report.

Hurricane Debby, June 2012. Hurricane Debby never formed. Increased vertical wind shear “consistent with” expectations from global warming prevented the development of tropical storm Debby into hurricane Debby. Damage estimates from tropical storm Debby have been estimated at $250 million with 5 direct and 3 indirect fatalities from the storm. Had global warming not helped to inhibit the growth of the storm system, these totals may well have been higher, exceeding a billion dollars. (For more information of the life of Debby, see here.)

California Freeze, January 11-16th, 2013. A 6-day major freeze event occurred across California’s agricultural regions, threatening a variety of crops including the state’s 2 billion/year citrus harvest. However, the region narrowly escaped widespread damage. Since an increased greenhouse effect from human carbon dioxide emissions preferentially warms the nighttime winter air, it is entirely “consistent with” expectations from global warming to hypothesize that absent global warming, a multi-billion dollar weather-related disaster would have occurred—much like the ones that have occurred there in the past.

The environment - a four-fer

4 Vancouver men aim to row the Northwest Passage
Four Vancouver adventurers say they hope to spark discussion about climate change by attempting to become the first people to row the Northwest Passage this summer.

On July 1, the four men will begin their journey in a specially designed 25-foot boat, starting from Inuvik and ending in Pond Inlet, Nunavut on the east coast of Baffin Island in the early fall.

The modern-day explorers say the Northwest Passage has become semi-navigable due to the deterioration of arctic ice from climate change.

The St. Roch was the first vessel to sail the Northwest Passage from west to east (1940-1942), the first to complete the passage in one season (1944), and the first to circumnavigate North America.

Met Office experts meet to analyse 'unusual' weather patterns
About 20 of the UK's leading scientists and meteorologists are due to meet at the Met Office to discuss Britain's "unusual" weather patterns.

They will try to identify the factors that caused the chilly winter of 2010-11 and the long, wet summer of 2012.

They will also try to work out why this spring was the coldest in 50 years - with a UK average of 6C (42.8F) between March and May.

The Met Office hopes the meeting will identify new priorities for research.

Climate Commission’s dupe: “one in two chance” of no humans by 2100
Retired admiral Chris Barrie is disturbingly prone to alarmism. He tells the ABC he’s read a book, Lord Rees’ Our Final Hour, which he says warned we’d be wiped out if we didn’t face “the climate change consequences and some other behaviours that are not so good”:

There’s a one in two chance that by 2100 there’ll be no human beings left on this planet. The planet will exist, but it’s just that my granddaughter won’t be part of it. And I think that’s a pretty alarming statistic, probability, one in two chance if we don’t correct our behaviours.

Referring to the Climate Commission’s report he “assisted” in launching, Barrie adds:

If anybody reads through this report and gets to the alarming conclusion that if we don’t correct our behaviour by the end of the decade, that is in seven years time, then our future looks pretty bleak.

The Climate Commission presents Barrie as some kind of global warming expert, and had him help launch their latest scare report. The ABC did not question Barrie’s credentials or his absurd claims.

Can they explain why?

Gulf of Mexico's Extinction-by-Ethanol
Less than a year after the summer drought of 2012 baked the U.S. grain belt, farmers in the region have been deluged by rain.

Aside from the threat that weather might pose for a second year to the U.S. harvest, the heavy rains may help fulfill of a prediction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: A swath of the northern Gulf of Mexico that each summer turns into a dead zone, drained of oxygen and devoid of life, will be larger than usual.

The dead zone starts innocently enough. Each year, when the snow melts and spring rains fall on Midwest farmland, millions of tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer that was applied to barren fields the previous autumn are washed into Mississippi River tributaries.

In years when there is more rain, more nitrogen ends up in the water -- and vice versa. Last year's drought is considered the main reason the 2012 dead zone covered only 2,889 square miles in the Gulf, the smallest in several years, and down from 6,767 square miles in 2011. If conditions are right this year, the dead zone might occupy an area the size of New Jersey, or 7,800 square miles. Researchers usually take an official measurement in July.

The culprits behind the dead zone are many, but one deserves special attention: corn. Unlike, say, soybeans, which can grow without fertilizer, corn can't grow without it. It takes 195 pounds of fertilizer to grow an acre of corn.

And the U.S. grows a lot of corn -- more than any other country. What's more, 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is devoted to making ethanol, which fuel companies must blend with gasoline under a congressional mandate. The Gulf dead zone is yet another reason for Congress to kill that mandate.

The sad truth of climate change

Is Fighting Global Warming the Solution to Water Shortages in Malawi (or Elsewhere)?
In late May two evangelical environmentalists, recently returned from visiting Malawi, published articles in which they said poor Malawians are suffering from reduced rainfall caused by manmade global warming.

Jonathan Merritt wrote for Religion News Service, “In America, climate change is a matter of debate, but in places like Malawi, it’s a matter of life and death.” Judd Birdsall wrote for Huffington Post, “In Fombe village, Malawi, climate change is not a matter of political or scientific debate. It’s a matter of survival.”

The implication was clear: To help the poor in Malawi (and other developing nations), we must fight global warming.

If either author had dug deeper, he might have concluded differently.

Although the controversial Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project reports about 0.6°C of warming for Malawi from about 1970 to about 2010, the data are highly suspect, coming from fewer than 10 monitoring stations in a country that stretches nearly 600 miles from north to south, averages about 75 miles wide, and is slightly larger in area than the State of Ohio. Granted the widespread deviance of temperature monitoring stations even in the U.S. from standards set to ensure accuracy, and the likelihood that “urban heat island” effect (which occurs even in small villages) accounts for about half of apparent global and regional warming in recent decades, it’s likely that BEST’s data for Malawi considerably exaggerate any warming there.

Another post that supports what I have always argued i.e. the real catastrophes of AGW have and will come, not from anything that climate has or is likely to produce, but from the greatly damaging, ineffectual, futile, and ultimately insane “solutions” that have been enacted already and are demanded for the future. “Solutions” to the “problem” of CO2 which it is increasingly evident is not one now nor likely to be much of one in the future. Indeed, if I was forced to make a guess, I would lean toward the suggestion that, when at some distant future point this matter is finally resolved scientifically, CO2 will be, like most of those things that have been ballyhooed as “bad” for us, ultimately found to be a net benefit.

In the mean time, even if all anti-carbon activity were to cease immediately, we would still be stuck with decades of work to unwind the waste, misery and death created by what has already been done in the name of carbon demonization.

Marxists have been working very diligently in Africa to insure that no nation becomes economically stable. Malawi with a strong economy, is the last thing they want.

Our prayers go out to the city of Moore, Oklahoma

Winter is not done with us yet

Special Weather Statement
...A CHANGE TO COLD WET AND POSSIBLY SNOWY WEATHER EXPECTED IN THE MOUNTAINS ON TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY...

LATE SEASON SNOW IS EXPECTED IN THE HIGH ELEVATIONS OF THE CASCADES AND OLYMPICS FROM LATE TUESDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY NIGHT. THIS WILL FOLLOW A DECEPTIVELY WARM...DRY AND SUNNY MONDAY.

A STRONG COLD FRONT WILL ARRIVE LATE MONDAY NIGHT AND TUESDAY MORNING. UNSEASONABLY COLD AIR IS EXPECTED BEHIND THE FRONT. THE SNOW LEVEL WILL DROP AS LOW AS 3000 FEET AROUND SUNRISE ON WEDNESDAY...RISING TO 4000 FEET ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. MEANWHILE...A SLOW-MOVING LOW PRESSURE CENTER OVER NORTHERN OREGON ON WEDNESDAY WILL SPIN POTENTIALLY COPIOUS PRECIPITATION NORTH INTO THE AREA. THE AFFECT WILL BE SEVERAL INCHES OF ACCUMULATING SNOW AT HIGH ELEVATIONS...ESPECIALLY ABOVE 4000 FEET. THIS WOULD IMPACT HIGHWAY PASSES THAT HAVE ALREADY OPENED FOR THE SUMMER... INCLUDING RAINY PASS AND CHINOOK PASS. STEVENS AND WHITE PASSES COULD ALSO BE IMPACTED. THE CURRENT FORECAST CALLS FOR LITTLE IMPACT AT SNOQUALMIE PASS.

The 2013 hurricane season

UPDATED: 2013 Hurricane Season Outlook
The Weather Channel released its first 2013 Atlantic hurricane season outlook on April 8, 2012, calling for another active season.

The forecast calls for a total of 16 named storms, 9 of which are expected to become hurricanes, including 5 major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale).

These forecast numbers are above the long-term average from 1950-2012 (12 named storms, 7 hurricanes, 3 major hurricanes) and slightly above the averages for the current active era from 1995-2012 (15 named storms, 8 hurricanes, 4 major hurricanes).

A nice essay on the past thirty-four years of global warming - where is it?

The End of an Illusion
Many years ago, I remember thinking that it would take many years to refute the panicked claims about global warming. Unlike most political movements, which content themselves with making promises about, say, what the unemployment rate will be in two years if we pass a giant stimulus bill—claims that are proven wrong (and how!) relatively quickly—the environmentalists had successfully managed to put their claims so far off into the future that it would take decades to test them against reality.

But guess what? The decades are finally here.

At Forbes, Harry Binswanger dates the beginning of the campaign to 1979 and puts it in an amusing perspective:

"Remember 1979? That was the year of 'We Are Family' by Sister Sledge, of 'The Dukes of Hazard' on TV, and of Kramer vs. Kramer on the silver screen. It was the year the Shah was forced out of Iran. It was before the web, before the personal computer, before the cell phone, before voicemail and answering machines. But not before the global warming campaign.

"In January of 1979, a New York Times article was headlined: 'Experts Tell How Antarctic Ice Could Cause Widespread Floods.'...

"So where's the warming? Where are the gondolas pulling up to the Capitol? Where are the encroaching seas in Florida? Or anywhere? Where is the climate change which, for 33 years, has been just around the corner?"

He concludes that "I've grown old waiting for the promised global warming." Literally: "I was 35 when predictions of a looming ice age were supplanted by warmmongering. Now I'm 68, and there's still no sign of warmer weather."

He puts the issue in terms of common-sense observation. But it can also be measured in terms of hard data. We're reaching the point where the predictions have been around long enough to allow for significant comparison against the actual data, and we are now able to say definitively that the predictions were horribly exaggerated.

The coming Ice Age

Oymyakon, the Pole of Cold

Coldest village in the world just got even COLDER... weather takes turn for the worse in -71C Russian hamlet where even the planes can't land in winter
As we whinge about the wintry weather here in Britain, spare a thought for those living in a Russian hamlet where temperatures can plummet to -71C, so cold even planes cannot land there in winter.

The valley of Oymyakon in northeast Russia is known as the 'Pole of Cold' and with an average January temperature of -50C, it is no wonder the village is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world.

This is the lowest recorded temperature for any permanently inhabited location on Earth and the lowest temperature recorded in the Northern Hemisphere.

The village, which is home to about 500 people, was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a stopover for reindeer herders who would water their flocks from the thermal spring.

But the Soviet government, in its efforts to settle nomadic populations, believing them to be difficult to control and technologically and culturally backward, made the site a permanent settlement.

Daily problems that come with living in Oymyakon include pen ink freezing, glasses freezing to people's faces and batteries losing power. Locals are said to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them.

Even if there was coverage for mobile phone reception the phones themselves would not work in such cold conditions.

Another problem caused by the frozen temperatures is burying dead bodies, which can take anything up to three days. The earth must first be thawed sufficiently in order to dig it, so a bonfire is lit for a couple of hours. Hot coals are then pushed to the side and a hole a couple of inches deep is dug. The process is repeated for several days until the hole is deep enough to bury the coffin.

Ironically, Oymyakon actually means 'non-freezing water' due to a nearby hot spring.

The gift that keeps on giving

Too Funny! I send Michael Mann a free WUWT calendar as a Christmas gift, and he goes full conspiracy theory

Last week I sent out a few free copies to some folks that I thought could really use some Christmas cheer: Dr. Mike Mann, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Dr. Peter Gleick, and Dana Nuccitelli.

Never beyond my wildest dreams did I think it would turn into a #Kochmachine conspiracy theory issue. But then again, there’s this strange pervading idea that skeptics are well funded and well organized. Here’s what Dr. Mann Tweeted today:

Where did #AnthonyWatts (#WUWT) get funds for widely distributed #climatechange #denier calendar? on.fb.me/12H62WI #KochMachine

Some Christmas gift notes for Dr. Michael Mann
As reported this past weekend, we had a hilarious case of Mann overboard! Since then, it has become the #1 story on WordPress worldwide. It stems from a $10 calendar from COSTCO I sent Dr. Mann, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Dr. Peter Gleick and Dana Nuccitelli of “Skeptical Science” as Christmas gifts. As I said then, a little good humor didn’t work on the humorless.

Not content to simply stay quiet or just admit he went overboard in his claims while the world laughs at his reactions, he goes further with this latest Tweet.

A widely distributed calender

About that global warming? Nevermind...

C.I.A. Closes Its Climate Change Office
The Central Intelligence Agency has disbanded its Center on Climate Change and National Security, a unit formed in 2009 to monitor the interplay between a warming planet and intelligence and security challenges.

The creation of the office drew fire at the time from some Republicans, who said it was an unnecessary expense and a distraction from the agency’s focus on terrorism and other more immediate threats. The agency did not say whether the closing was related to budget constraints or other political pressures.

Todd Ebitz, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency would continue to monitor the security and humanitarian challenges posed by climate change as part of its focus on economic security, but not in a stand-alone office.

Transitions - peat bogs and ice ages

Carbon dioxide – our salvation from a future ice age?
Mankind’s emissions of fossil carbon and the resulting increase in temperature could prove to be our salvation from the next ice age. According to new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, the current increase in the extent of peatland is having the opposite effect.

“We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we’re not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide”, says researcher Professor Lars Franzén.

Looking back over the past three million years, the earth has experienced at least 30 periods of ice age, known as ice age pulses. The periods in between are called interglacials. The researchers believe that the Little Ice Age of the 16th to 18th centuries may have been halted as a result of human activity. Increased felling of woodlands and growing areas of agricultural land, combined with the early stages of industrialisation, resulted in increased emissions of carbon dioxide which probably slowed down, or even reversed, the cooling trend.

“It is certainly possible that mankind’s various activities contributed towards extending our ice age interval by keeping carbon dioxide levels high enough,” explains Lars Franzén, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Gothenburg.

“Without the human impact, the inevitable progression towards an ice age would have continued. The spread of peatlands is an important factor.”

Sandy quote of the week

It is true that Sandy was a human-caused disaster. We build cities on the coast. We don’t adequately protect them. We don’t heed evacuation warnings. That is where the blame lies for this one, not climate change.

The climate v/s the weather

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.

Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

Flood warnings after snowfall in west of England
Flood warnings have been issued after three inches of snow fell across parts of the West Country and southern England, causing disruption to transport.

The snowfall happened early on Sunday and affected parts of Wiltshire, Somerset, North Dorset and Devon.

Flood warnings were put in place as the snow began to melt away, with one bridge in danger of collapse.

A BBC weather forecaster said brighter weather was expected on Monday.

Areas including Bath, Frome and Midsomer Norton and Radstock in the Mendips were affected by snow, with up to 6in (15cm) reported in places.

Things are slowly winding down for Sandy (with emphasis on slowly)

flood, fire: low tide
With the waters receding, all the cars and heavy equipment densely parked behind the warehouse in the last photo were uncovered. My guess is that an electrical spark, coupled perhaps with some liberated gasoline from a submerged fuel tank vent, led to a small fire. Which led to a big fire. And some explosions. We are upwind and have a decent-sized concrete dock between us and the cars, so we stayed put while our tug called 911. The fire department took forever to find the place. I saw them 10 minutes before they got in the neighborhood, and then another 15 minutes to dig up a masonry saw to cut through the fences in their way. Eventually they got to the fire and about 30 minutes later they put it out. My camera was overwhelmed between the lights, backscatter from the fire monitors on the tugs being turned on (monitors are the super-sized water cannon that you see on fire boats; many tugs have one just in case. ).

Next high tide is in a few hours. Not supposed to be as high as the last one, but still might be rotten.

Tanker Run Aground by Superstorm
Powerful storm surges from Superstorm Sandy caused a nearly 170-foot water tanker to run aground in Staten Island, N.Y., on Monday night.

The front third of the tanker is grounded into Front Street. The city's waterfront was largely destroyed, which includes a number of businesses on the water.

The 168-foot tanker was moored about a mile away when Sandy's powerful force propelled it toward land.

No one was on the tanker and no one was hurt as a result of it running aground.

Tall Ship Bounty Abandoned, Sinks in Heavy Seas off Hatteras, 1 Body Recovered, 1 Still Missing [UPDATE 3]
Coast Guard Sector North Carolina initially received a call from the owner of the Bounty saying she had lost communication with the vessel’s crew late Sunday evening.

The Coast Guard 5th District command center in Portsmouth subsequently received a signal from the emergency position indicating radio beacon registered to the Bounty, confirming the distress and position.

An air crew from Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City launched aboard an HC-130 Hercules aircraft, which later arrived on scene and reestablished communications with the Bounty’s crew.

The vessel was reportedly taking on water and was without propulsion. On scene weather is reported to be 40 mph winds and 18-foot seas.

Paul, Dammit! - an hour ago

2200 Update (now with photos!)
We're still here! We're moored to a dock that is completely submerged. Our mooring lines are stretched tight to moorings that are 4 feet or more underwater. The surge is about 14 feet above normal high tide. Gusts are over 115mph, seems to be holding steady winds around 75mph.

My truck is gone. I loved that truck. I shall mourn it.
My employer's office presumably is a total loss.
So far, no one has been hurt or killed within my company's ranks.
This is a major success.
I don't think we'll be moving tomorrow. It's nasty.

If you can see from the pic, the water is receding now. It's currently about the height of the doorknob at the warehouse, so, figure about 3 1/2 feet above the dock. Quite a misery.

Prudent move from Con Edison

Con Edison shuts off power to part of Lower Manhattan due to Sandy
New York power company Consolidated Edison Inc said on Monday that it had shut off power to part of Lower Manhattan to protect company equipment and customers and to allow for quicker restoration after Hurricane Sandy passes.

And it is just starting in NY City

Mammoth storm Sandy plunges NYC into darkness
Much of New York was plunged into darkness Monday by a superstorm that overflowed the city's historic waterfront, flooded the financial district and subway tunnels and cut power to nearly a million people.

The city had shut its mass transit system, schools, the stock exchange and Broadway and ordered hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to leave home to get out of the way of the superstorm Sandy as it zeroed in on the nation's largest city.

Residents spent much of the day trying to salvage normal routines, jogging and snapping pictures of the water while officials warned the worst of the storm had not hit.

By evening, a record 13-foot storm surge was threatening Manhattan's southern tip, howling winds had sent a crane hanging from a high-rise, and utilities deliberately darkened part of downtown Manhattan to avoid storm damage.

Water lapped over the seawall in Battery Park City, flooding rail yards, subway tracks, tunnels and roads. Rescue workers floated bright orange rafts down flooded downtown streets, while police officers rolled slowly down the street with loudspeakers telling people to go home.

"Now it's really turning into something," said Brian Damianakes, taking shelter in an ATM vestibule and watching a trash can blow down the street in Battery Park.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday night that the surge was expected to recede by midnight, after exceeding an original expectation of 11 feet.

"The worst of the weather has come," he said. He said New Yorkers were inundating the 911 system and getting stranded in cars, and urged people to stay put until the storm passed.

"You have to stay wherever you are. Let me repeat that. You have to stay wherever you are," he said.

Update from Paul, Dammit!

Not much of a calm before the storm
Winds are getting a little more lusty and a lot more gusty while I was off watch. I slept like a baby, though (And what does that mean? You woke up wet and crying a few times, and at some point you shit yourself?).

Storm surge for this high tide seems to be about the same as the last one. So far so good. The news is too repetitive to watch. A bunch of folks on a bunch of beaches asking each other what the weather is. Here's the weather: It's wet, it's windy. Back to you at the studio, Linda.

Maybe they're false memories at this point, but I remember the hurricanes when I was a kid as coming with an eerie yellow sky the day of, before the wind started, and all the neighborhood dogs getting weird. No dogs out here- but the damn tide is high, for sure, and it's been blowing hard for about 24 hours now, so I guess this is the weather we'll be having until the wind starts to moan and whistle through the antennas up on the overhead.

Edit: it's about 0900 now. In the last 30 minutes the wind has seriously ramped up, and the damn tide is still rising. 6 inches more and the dock we're moored alongside will be under water.

Sandy update - Monday morning

Good news and not so much from Paul, Dammit!

hunkered down
So we're in a hurricane berth, wedged between a couple of Army Corps of Engineers dredge ships, and there are 20 (!) dock lines out securing us to a dock that will probably be underwater in about 6 hours, but even so, we're in a nice protected spot up in Pt. Elizabeth NJ, which is good, because that bitch storm Sandy is about to rain on us directly overhead tomorrow.

With a 6-11 foot storm surge predicted and 2 days of sustained storm-force or better winds, my psychic alter-ego, Nostradumbass, predicts a busy time tending lines and trying to keep us in the water and not on top of the dock or floating into the warehouses across the quay.

Also, it occurs to me that my truck is sitting in Red Hook NY, which has been evacuated for fear of extensive flooding. My truck is in a lovely parking lot with a water view, only 6 feet or so above the high tide line.
Fuck.

Ho Li Crap - Sandy

Stunning super high res image of Hurricane Sandy – plus forecast of a large storm surge
UPDATE: The NWS in Mt. Holly NJ has put out an extraordinary statement, dropping the typical “gov speak” and pleading to people in direct language. See below.

GOES-14 has been brought into service again on October 25th, 2012 for SRSOR imaging of Hurricane Sandy. (h/t to Al Lipton) Here’s a super high resolution visible light image of Sandy from today at 19:41UTC.

While there is no well defined eye, there is evidence of increased cyclonic vorticity and organization.

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MOUNT HOLLY NJ
241 PM EDT SUN OCT 28 2012

...AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS STORM TO IMPACT THE AREA...

SANDY IS EXPECTED TO SLAM INTO THE NEW JERSEY COAST LATER MONDAY NIGHT, BRINGING VERY HEAVY RAIN AND DAMAGING WINDS TO THE REGION. THE STORM IS A LARGE ONE, THEREFORE DO NOT FOCUS ON THE EXACT CENTER OF THE STORM AS ALL AREAS WILL HAVE SIGNIFICANT IMPACTS.

THIS HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE AN HISTORIC STORM, WITH WIDESPREAD WIND DAMAGE AND POWER OUTAGES, INLAND AND COASTAL FLOODING, AND MASSIVE BEACH EROSION. THE COMBINATION OF THE HEAVY RAIN AND PROLONGED WIND WILL CREATE THE POTENTIAL FOR LONG LASTING POWER OUTAGES AND SERIOUS FLOODING.

PREPARATIONS SHOULD BE WRAPPING UP AS CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED TO WORSEN TONIGHT AND ESPECIALLY ON MONDAY.

SOME IMPORTANT NOTES...

1. IF YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO EVACUATE A COASTAL LOCATION BY STATE AND LOCAL OFFICIALS, PLEASE DO SO.

2. IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT TO EVACUATE, AND YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO RODE OUT THE `62 STORM ON THE BARRIER ISLANDS, ASK THEM IF THEY COULD DO IT AGAIN.

3. IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT, THINK ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES, THINK ABOUT THE EMERGENCY RESPONDERS WHO WILL BE UNABLE TO REACH YOU WHEN YOU MAKE THE PANICKED PHONE CALL TO BE RESCUED, THINK ABOUT THE RESCUE/RECOVERY TEAMS WHO WILL RESCUE YOU IF YOU ARE INJURED OR RECOVER YOUR REMAINS IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE.

4. SANDY IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS STORM. THERE WILL BE MAJOR PROPERTY DAMAGE, INJURIES ARE PROBABLY UNAVOIDABLE, BUT THE GOAL IS ZERO FATALITIES.

5. IF YOU THINK THE STORM IS OVER-HYPED AND EXAGGERATED, PLEASE ERR ON THE SIDE OF CAUTION.

WE WISH EVERYONE IN HARMS WAY ALL THE BEST. STAY SAFE!

$$

NWS MOUNT HOLLY, NJ

Just in time for Sandy

Statue of Liberty reopens today after $30 million interior renovation
Her beauty isn’t only skin deep.

After a yearlong, $30 million interior makeover, Lady Liberty is ready for her closeup as she reopens to the public today.

The mostly federally funded renovation to the 126-year-old Statue of Liberty includes fire-safety and ventilation improvements, better bathrooms, a third elevator and a remodeled staircase with 39 extra steps to make it easier to climb from pedestal to crown.

And, for the first time ever, there is wheelchair access to the top of the pedestal.

The statue will open today, said superintendent David Luchsinger, but officials say it and Ellis Island could be closed tomorrow and Tuesday because of Hurricane Sandy.

“She’s been here for 126 years. She’ll be here after this one,” Luchsinger said.

Interesting but slow

NYC's Mayor Bloomberg channels his inner Ray Nagin

Get The Hell Out
Being up in Wyoming with my older girls, away from my computer, I have limited information about Sandy right now. But from what I’m seeing on Twitter, it appears: 1) the computer models indicate that the threat of a catastrophic storm surge in New York City has increased, and is a VERY real (though, of course, not certain) threat; and 2) Mayor Bloomberg has affirmatively decided NOT to evacuate even the most low-lying areas of his vulnerable city, nor even to close the city government or schools Monday.

If I have all of that right, it makes no damn sense at all.

Bloomberg’s error here could be even worse than that of Ray Nagin, who merely delayed too long, but who at least did ultimately give the obviously necessary evacuation order. It’s also hard to square Bloomberg’s inaction with his proactive — and correct — actions in advance of Irene. Perhaps he’s now gun-shy because of ignorant hindsight 20/20 criticisms of that “unnecessary” evacuation. If so, he’s a damn fool, along with those who criticized him then for an evacuation that was fully justified by contemporaneous information.

In any case, if I lived in a “Zone A” or “Zone B” area of NYC, I’d get the hell out, tonight. (Or tomorrow, if I could easily travel by foot to my non-flood-prone destination.) It’s not even a close call. Same goes for any other location in the cone of uncertainty that’s vulnerable to a potential (not certain–it’s never certain–but realistic potential) storm surge of 6-10 feet, plus very high surf on top of that, at astronomical high tide.

Mayor Bloomberg: Zone A Ordered Evacuated, Public Schools Closed Monday
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced he signed an executive order mandating the evacuation of Zone A by 7 p.m.

Bloomberg warned residents who live in Zone A that all elevators in the zone will be shut down at 7 p.m. and urged residents to get to higher ground quickly, before subway and bus service is shut down.

“If you don’t evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you,” he said at a news conference Sunday. “This is a serious and dangerous storm.”

In addition, Mayor Bloomberg announced all city schools have been closed for Monday. Alternate side of the street parking has also been suspended for Monday.

Sandy update from Dr. Jeff Masters

Sandy likely to be a multi-billion dollar disaster for the U.S.
Hurricane Sandy is holding its own against high wind shear of 30 - 40 knots, and has regained its Category 1 strength after falling to tropical storm strength early this morning. Sandy is a massive storm, with tropical storm-force winds that span a 660-mile diameter area of ocean from a point even with central Florida northwards to a point off the central North Carolina coast. Twelve-foot high seas cover a diameter of ocean 1,000 miles across.

If Sandy hits near New York City, as the GFS model predicts, the storm surge will be capable of overtopping the flood walls in Manhattan, which are only five feet above mean sea level. On August 28, 2011, Tropical Storm Irene brought a storm surge of 4.13' to Battery Park on the south side of Manhattan. The waters poured over the flood walls into Lower Manhattan, but came 8 - 12" shy of being able to flood the New York City subway system.

New York was not as lucky on December 12, 1992, when a 990 mb Nor'easter drove an 8-foot storm surge into Battery Park, flooding the NYC subway and the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH) train systems in Hoboken New Jersey. FDR Drive in lower Manhattan was flooded with 4 feet of water, which stranded more than 50 cars and required scuba divers to rescue some of the drivers. Mass transit between New Jersey and New York was down for ten days, and the storm did hundreds of millions in damage to the city. The highest water level recorded at the Battery in the past century came in September 1960 during Hurricane Donna, which brought a storm surge of 8.36 feet to the Battery and flooded lower Manhattan to West and Cortland Streets. According to the latest storm surge forecast for NYC from the experimental Extratropical Storm Surge model, run by NOAA"s Meteorological Development Laboratory, Sandy's storm surge may be higher than Irene's, and has the potential to flood New York City's subway system. The amount of water will depend critically upon whether or not the peak storm surge arrives at high tide or not. If the peak surge arrives near Monday evening's high tide near 9 pm EDT, a portion of New York City's subway system could flood, resulting in billions of dollars in damage. I give a 30% chance that Sandy's storm surge will end up flooding a portion of the New York City subway system.

Sandy update from Geoff Fox

Sandy Remains An Impressive Threat
Saturday afternoon. Pajamas. Kitchen table. Laptop. Worried look.

I’m scared I’m right. I’m scared I’m wrong. The meteorologist’s conundrum.

Each and every aspect of Sandy’s impact on Connecticut looks worse than anything I’ve seen before and I’ve been forecasting here 28 years.

With the time frame for Sandy’s arrival getting shorter there’s more guidance to look at. Some projections only go out 72 hours. I didn’t need them until now.

A huge concern is the shoreline. Water will pile up in the Sound before Sandy gets here. As the storm approaches windblown waves will form on top of that temporarily elevated sea level. At the same time the full moon will bring higher than normal tides!

The high tide at New London Monday evening is now forecast five feet above what’s on the tide tables. In Bridgeport the high tide will be seven feet above. In both cases the high tide will be broader and longer than usual as storm surge builds.

If tides come as now projected, Bridgeport breaks the record high tide measured during the Hurricane of ’38!

Beginning to prepare - Hurricane Sandy

U.S. power companies brace for Hurricane Sandy
U.S. electric companies from Maine to Florida were bracing for heavy wind, rain and flooding that could take down power lines and threaten to close some East Coast nuclear plants early next week when Hurricane Sandy comes ashore.

More than a dozen nuclear plants are located near Hurricane Sandy's path in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut, providing power to millions of customers in the region.

Hurricane Sandy

watching...waiting
Looks like we might get some saucy weather early next week. The National Weather Service is already blaming global warming, president Bush and the 1%.

But, no, seriously, it looks like the weather might be shitty after the weekend. The NWS, having seen the writing on the wall after Italy threw their seismologists under the bus last week for not predicting an earthquake, have predicted a 70% chance or rain, snow, wind, Kansas-to-Neverland wormholes, frogs, locusts and death of the firstborn son of the pharoh for New York. In between the chicken little screaming and running in circles, there is an ominous, slightly more worth-taking-time-to- ponder pressure gradient forming in the upper atmosphere, which, when coupled with the predicted tracks of said systems, could be quite shittay.

I'll keep my eye on it. I might have an unwanted day off next week, spent getting sandblasted by flying dust while trying to keep secured to a lay berth somewhere.

And so it begins anew

SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SEATTLE WA
336 PM PDT THU OCT 18 2012

WAZ513-518-519-191145-
OLYMPICS-WEST SLOPES NORTHERN CASCADES AND PASSES-
WEST SLOPES CENTRAL CASCADES AND PASSES-
336 PM PDT THU OCT 18 2012

...FIRST SNOWFALL OF THE SEASON IN THE PASSES THIS WEEKEND...

SNOW LEVELS WILL PLUNGE FRIDAY NIGHT TO THEIR LOWEST LEVEL OF THE
SEASON SO FAR. BY SATURDAY MORNING THE SNOW LEVEL WILL BE AROUND
3000 FEET. SHOWERS ARE IN THE FORECAST FRIDAY THROUGH THE WEEKEND.
SEVERAL INCHES OF SNOW ARE LIKELY OVER THE WEEKEND IN THE HIGHER
PASSES SUCH AS RAINY PASS AND CHINOOK PASS. SNOW COULD ALSO STICK
IN LOWER PASSES SUCH AS SNOQUALMIE...STEVENS...AND WHITE PASSES.
TRAVEL IS LIKELY TO BE IMPACTED AT TIMES.

OF COURSE THERE WILL ALSO BE SNOW IN THE MOUNTAINS AWAY FROM THE
PASSES. SEVERAL INCHES COULD COVER HIKING TRAILS. HIGHER AREAS
WILL GET MORE SNOW. ANYONE PLANNING TO TRAVEL IN THE MOUNTAINS
SHOULD BE PREPARED FOR WINTER CONDITIONS.

THE SNOW LEVEL WILL REMAIN LOW ALL OF NEXT WEEK AS WELL. SHOWERS
REMAIN IN THE FORECAST AND SNOW WILL FALL AT TIMES IN THE MOUNTAINS.

Party like it's 2005

Isaac A Major Threat to New Orleans; Is Anyone Paying Attention?
As Tropical Storm Isaac continues to churn–and struggle a bit–in the waters off Cuba, Hurricane Watches are up from southeastern Louisiana to the Big Bend of Florida, and the über-vulnerable city of New Orleans has moved inside the NHC’s cone of uncertainty. Three of the best American forecast models — the GFS, HWRF and GFDL — are in almost lockstep agreement this morning that Tropical Storm Isaac will track toward southeastern Louisiana over the next 60 or so hours. Here is what the GFS expects last Tuesday night — an intensifying, borderline Category 3-4 hurricane coming ashore on a near worst-case track for the Big Easy.

Despite all this, I get the sense that most people aren’t paying attention. Last night I noted that Drudge and NOLA.com still aren’t focusing on the New Orleans threat; well, they still aren’t. Moreover, Twitter searches for “New Orleans evacuation” and “Landrieu evacuation” (Mitch Landrieu is NOLA’s mayor) turn up almost literally no discussion. Not only have evacuations not been ordered yet, it seems nobody is even talking about the possibility. I keep seeing tweets from people who seem genuinely shocked when they learn New Orleans is under threat, like this is something nobody is discussing. Ugh.

Yet 48 hours from now, conditions could be starting to deteriorate in New Orleans. And pre-Katrina studies indicated it takes 48-72 hours to evacuate the city. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!! WAKE UP, MEDIA!! WAKE UP, GOVERNMENT!! This feels like 2005 all over again, in terms of the apathy and inattention at this stage. Isaac might not hit New Orleans — it might very well go elsewhere, I want to emphasize that — and it might very well not be as strong as feared (more on that below). But you don’t make preparations based on wishes and hopes. You make them based on realistic worst-case scenarios. The realistic worst-case scenario for New Orleans right now is really bad. People need to start paying attention to this!! If I lived in New Orleans, I’d already have packed my bags overnight and I’d be getting the Hell out of town this morning, as a precaution. The worst thing that can happen in an unnecessary evacuation is, you get a mini-vacation that proves to have been needless in retrospect because the storm doesn’t intensify much, or goes elsewhere. That’s a lot better than the worst thing that can happen if you stay (or wait too long to decide to leave), and the storm hits. New Orleans, remember, is largely a below-sea-level bowl. If you thought the levees breaking was bad, wait until you see what happens if a storm comes in on a sufficient worst-case track to overtop the levees. The long-studied worst-case scenarios for New Orleans are horrible.

Before I quote the NHC’s 5:00 AM advisory, I want to say a word about the uncertainty of this forecast, regarding the storm’s intensity in particular. Lest anyone believe I treat these computer model intensity projections as gospel, my personal feeling is that I’ll believe the modeled extreme strengthening when I see it actually begin to happen. Isaac has shown a tendency to underperform its intensity models thus far, and the waters in the Gulf aren’t as conducive to insanely rapid deepening as they were in 2005. I’d be pretty surprised if Isaac ever becomes a Cat. 4 or 5, and while I think Cat. 3 is very possible, I think a Cat. 1-2 type situation is also very possible. But again, planners, and folks in harm’s way, must assume the worst! I’m seeing some comments from folks dismissing the threat of a major hurricane as “nonsense,” or hype, given the storm’s current state. That’s ignorant. Don’t mistake your own suspicions and educated guesses for a scientifically unimpeachable forecast that people can rely upon when making life-or-death decisions. Isaac MAY VERY WELL NOT strengthen as much as forecast by the computer models, but that doesn’t mean we can dismiss and ignore those models. We must take them seriously, because what they’re predicting COULD occur. Rapid intensification can and does happen. Isaac wouldn’t be the first storm to look this disorganized, then be a major hurricane two days later. Will it happen? Again, we don’t know for sure, and I’ll fully believe it when I see it. But it’s not some crazy, hype-driven “nonsense” idea. To claim otherwise is not only ignorant but downright dangerous. That sort of false sense of security can literally kill people.

In the pay of big oil

NOAA releases tranche of FOIA documents – 2 years later
Today, NOAA finally delivered thousands of pages (hard copy, oddly, despite our request for electronic copies) of additional records that had been withheld during the deliberations over what to produce for a thorough FOIA seeking records relating to the HS, Mann’s appointment, Menne/surface stations, M&M, Climategate and the like.

This is a request from two years ago that has produced thousands of pages of papers and emails (all of the good stuff among which, in an odd coincidence, having already been produced under Climategate) and was the last in a series of four requests in response to which NOAA claimed ‘no responsive records’, when actually referring to records which they possessed but which Susan Solomon had said were really IPCC records and therefore not agency records. The subsequent IG investigation uncovering this response given to others, which we challenged when given to us, affirmed that this claim was not appropriate.

Temperature History in the Pacific Northwest

Pacific Northwest Temperatures Have Been Trending Downward For the Last 25 Years, Despite Predictions of Continued Warming
Reports from Oregon and Washington in recent years have suggested that climate change is resulting in continued temperature increases and pronounced environmental impacts across the Pacific Northwest. These reports also suggest that increases in atmospheric CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels are primarily responsible for these Pacific Northwest temperature increases. The discussion below presents figures and information from the National Climatic Data Center indicating that Pacific Northwest annual temperatures have actually been trending downward at a rate of 0.15°F per decade for the last 25 years and trending downward at a rate of 2.75°F per decade for the last 8 years, even as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of atmospheric CO2 were both increasing.

Holy Crap

Learned a new word today - Derecho

Derecho
A derecho is a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of a bow echo. Derechos blow in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to a gust front, except that the wind is sustained and generally increases in strength behind the "gust" front. A warm weather phenomenon, derechos occur mostly in summer, especially June and July in the Northern Hemisphere. They can occur at any time of the year and occur as frequently at night as in the daylight hours.

Derecho comes from the Spanish word for "straight". The word was first used in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 by Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs in a paper describing the phenomenon and based on a significant derecho event that crossed Iowa on 31 July 1877.

Rain rain go away

Unintended consequences - Dr. Michael Mann

Cap and Trade jumps the shark

‘Cap and Trade’ fails for lack of incentives
From the DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

New research suggests cap and trade programs do not provide sufficient incentives for innovation

Cap and trade programs to reduce emissions do not inherently provide incentives to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change, according to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In fact, said author Margaret Taylor, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who conducted the study while an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, the success of some cap and trade programs in achieving predetermined pollution reduction targets at low cost seems to have reduced incentives for research and development that could help develop more appropriate pollution control targets. Taylor is a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab.

“Policymakers rarely see with perfect foresight what the appropriate emissions targets are to protect the public health and environment—the history is that these targets usually need to get stricter,” said Taylor. “Yet policymakers also seldom set targets they don’t have evidence that industry can meet. This is where R&D that can lead to the development of innovative technologies over the longer term is essential.”

When I hear the word Policy, I reach for my revolver.

When I hear the word Planning, I reach for my revolver.

How's that global warming working out for you

Hungary orders Danube closed amid big freeze
Hungary closed the Danube to river traffic Friday due to thick ice, bringing shipping to a near standstill on Europe's busiest waterway, as the continent's cold snap death toll passed 540.

"Shipping was ordered stopped overnight Thursday to Friday because of conditions created by icing along the Hungarian part of the river," Istvan Lang, who heads the national technical supervisory body OMIT said.

"All ships still underway must immediately head for the closest harbour," Lang, quoted by MTI news agency, said.

Hungary's navy had to send its biggest icebreaker, the Szechenyi, to try to ram through the frozen river at Budapest.

"I've not seen so much ice on the Danube since 1985," said its captain, Dezso Kovacs.

The freeze had already forced other countries along the Danube, including Austria, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, to suspend river traffic.

The 2,860-kilometre (1,780-mile) river, which flows through 10 countries and is vital for transport, power, irrigation, industry and fishing, was nearly wholly blocked, from Austria to its mouth on the Black Sea.

Serbia's government reduced power supplies to 2,000 companies it said were not vital to everyday life and appealed to consumers to cut energy use by 10 percent.

But consumption hit 162.67 million kWh per day -- which local media said was around 10 percent more than the same period last year.

Wonderful quote from Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.”

They still haven’t done the calculations – or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet indeed. Here’s why:

Wheels coming off the AGW bus

Briggs schools the “Bad Astronomer” on statistics
That letter signed by 16 scientists saying there’s “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” to the Wall Street Journal has caused a great disturbance in the farce. At last count there were no less than 19 blog rebuttals plus one new WSJ op ed piece trying to convince the alliance that all is well. It didn’t work.

But, they know the AGW Alliance Death Star has been compromised before its mission can be completed, the Rebellion has seen the plans and the Alliance knows it is only a matter of time before “the consensus” blows apart. Reports are that “Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously“, but the reinforcements he’s bringing in may not be able to stop the Rebellion as its ranks swell with ordinary people.

Here at WUWT, we had our best day ever on January 31st with 229,000 views from ordinary people, exceeding the heady days just after Climategate 1 and Copenhagen. People are coming in out of the cold to embrace the warmth and declare it good, while laughing at the folly of the alliance.

Meanwhile, the Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait er, not Jim Hansen) has been spinning in low orbit trying tell alliance forces that the past 10-15 years of stalled temperature rise are just a statistical illusion.

William Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, schools Plait on what statistics really is and writes:

Remember when I said how you shouldn’t draw straight lines in time series and then speak of the line as if the line was the data itself? About how the starting point made a big difference in the slope of the line, and how not accounting for uncertainty in the starting date translates into over-certainty in the results?

If you can’t recall, refresh your memory: How To Cheat, Or Fool Yourself, With Time Series: Climate Example.

Well, not everybody read those warnings. As an example of somebody who didn’t do his homework, I give you Phil Plait, a fellow who prides himself on exposing bad astronomy and blogs at Discover magazine. Well, Phil, old boy, I am the Statistician to the Stars—get it? get it?1—and I’m here to set you right.

The London Daily Mail on Global warming cooling whateveah

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Global Warming hits the Wall Street Journal

Sixteen prominent scientists publish a letter in WSJ saying there’s “No Need to Panic About Global Warming”
This is quite something. Sixteen scientists, including such names as Richard Lindzen, William Kininmonth, Wil Happer, and Nir Shaviv, plus engineer Burt Rutan, and Apollo 17 astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmidt, among others, write what amounts to a heretical treatise to the Wall Street Journal, expressing their view that the global warming is oversold, has stalled in the last decade, and that the search for meaningful warming has led to co-opting weather patterns in the blame game. Oh, and a history lesson on Lysenkoism as it relates to today’s warming-science-funding-complex. I can hear Joe Romm’s head exploding all the way out here in California.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Just wonnerful

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SEATTLE WA
201 PM PST MON JAN 23 2012

.A STRONG FRONTAL SYSTEM WILL BRING SNOW...HEAVY AT TIMES...TO
THE NORTH AND CENTRAL CASCADES OF WESTERN WASHINGTON. IN ADDITION
TO SNOWFALL...A PERIOD OF FREEZING RAIN IS ALSO POSSIBLE IN THE
CENTRAL CASCADES DUE TO FLUCTUATING SNOW LEVELS.

* SOME AFFECTED LOCATIONS...MOUNT BAKER.

* TIMING...MID MORNING TUESDAY THROUGH MIDDAY WEDNESDAY.

* SNOW ACCUMULATIONS...1 TO 2 FEET WITH LOCAL AMOUNTS UP TO 3
FEET.

Must read - testimony before Congress on Climate Change

Congressman Rohrabacher’s speech on climate issues
Mr. Speaker, tonight, as a strong advocate of human progress through advancing mankind’s understanding of science and engineering, I rise to discuss a blatant abuse and misuse of science.

A few nights ago, I watched a video of President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address.

Unfortunately, his much heralded prescient warning of a military/industrial complex has obscured another warning in that farewell address that is just as significant:

Eisenhower pointed to the danger:

“of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

In my lifetime there’s been no greater example of this threat, which Ike warned us about, than the insidious coalition of research science and political largess, a coalition that has conducted an unrelenting crusade to convince the American People that their health and safety, and yes the very survival of our planet, is at risk due to man-made global warming. The purpose of this greatest of all propaganda campaigns is to enlist public support for, if not just acquiescence to, dramatic mandated change of our society, and to our way of life.

This campaign has such momentum and power that it is now a tangible threat to our freedom, and to our prosperity as a people. Ironically, as the crusade against Man-made Global Warming grows in power, more evidence surfaces every day that the scientific theory, on which the alarmists base their crusade, is totally bogus. The general public and decision makers for decades have been inundated with phony science, altered numbers, and outright fraud. This is the ultimate power grab in the name of saving the world. And like all fanatics, disagreement is not allowed.

Prominent scientists who have been skeptical with the claims of man-made Global Warming have themselves been cut from research grants, and obstructed when trying to publish peer reviewed dissenting opinions. How the mainstream media, or publications like the National Journal, have ignored this systematic oppression is beyond me.

If you’ve heard the words “case closed,” it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the purpose of such a proclamation is limiting and repressing debate. Well, the case isn’t closed, so let’s start with some facts about the man-made global warming theory.

Update on Climategate 2

Tallbloke towers raided: many computers taken
An Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.

I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something.

I managed to log out of my email on the big lappy as they sat down, to the annoyance of the Computer expert. he soon regained his composure though and asked his first question.

How many computers do you have in the house?

Oh, I’m not sure… around twenty.

I breezily replied.

Some glances were exchanged.

“So where are they” he asked.

“Most of them are up in the attic bedroom. We’re in the middle of decorating it. You’ll have to mind the wet paint…”

After surveying my ancient stack of Sun Sparcstations and PII 400 pc’s, they ended up settling for two laptops and an adsl broadband router. I’m blogging this post via my mobile.

I got the feeling something was on the go last night when WordPress forwarded a notice from the U.S. Department of Justice. I’ll post it tomorrow once I get access to the net from a bigger keyboard sorted out.

Climate Change - an open debate (not so much

Climate change science being stifled by NSW Labor bureaucrats
SENIOR bureaucrats in the state government's environment department have routinely stopped publishing scientific papers which challenge the federal government's claims of sea level rises threatening Australia's coastline, a former senior public servant said yesterday.

Doug Lord helped prepare six scientific papers which examined 120 years of tidal data from a gauge at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour.

The tide data revealed sea levels were rising at a rate of about 1mm a year or less - and the rise was not accelerating but was constant.

"The tidal data we found would mean sea levels would rise by about 100mm by the end of the century," Mr Lord said yesterday.

"However the (federal) government benchmark which drives their climate change policy is that sea levels are expected to rise by 900mm by the end of the century and the rate of rise is accelerating."

Mr Lord, who has 35 years experience in coastal engineering, said senior bureaucrats within the then Department of Environment Climate Change and Water had rejected or stopped publication of five papers between late 2009 and September this year.

Climategate 2.0 - a shift in England

Cameron's green guru reveals his doubts over global warming
Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s director of strategy and ‘green guru’, is the latest person to admit to doubts about climate change.

‘I’m not sure I believe in it,’ he announced at a meeting of the Energy Department, prompting one aide to blurt out: ‘Did I just hear that correctly?’

According to one witness, Hilton, 41, the man who coined the slogan ‘Vote Blue and Go Green’ and changed the Tory symbol from a Stalinist style torch to an eco friendly tree, said: ‘Climate change arguments are highly complex.

‘My focus has always been more on using green issues to improve the quality of life.’

Hilton famously persuaded David Cameron to go to the Arctic with a pack of huskies to prove that he was determined to combat global warming in his early days as Tory leader.

Now, however, Hilton as become a big fan of former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, a vocal critic of the global warming lobby.

Hilton’s new doubts chime with the Prime Minister’s decision to tone down his previous emphasis on environmental measures to concentrate on stimulating economic growth.

Climategate 2.0

Climategate 2.0 update

Climategate 2: More ado about nothing. Again.
Geez, this again? Seriously?

Two years ago, someone hacked into a University of East Anglia server and anonymously posted thousands of emails from climate scientists. Quickly dubbed "Climategate", global warming deniers jumped on this, trying to show that these scientists were engaging in fraudulent activities. However, it was clear to anyone familiar with how research is done that this was complete and utter bilge; the scientists were not trying to hide anything, were not trying to trick anyone, and were not trying to falsely exaggerate the dangers of climate change.

Climategate 2.0? More Emails Leaked From Climate Researchers
A new batch of emails purportedly stolen from the servers at the University of East Anglia were posted online Tuesday, echoing the 2009 data breach dubbed "Climategate" that turned the world's attention to the internal debates among scientists hoping to determine whether man's actions are warming the planet.

Excerpts from the emails posted on climate skeptic websites are certainly eye-opening:

<1939> Thorne/MetO: Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.

<3066> Thorne: I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<4755> Overpeck: The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.

The leak comes less than a week before the latest United Nations meeting intended to control carbon emissions and monitor the world's climate -- a fact underscored in a document that accompanied the leaked emails.

"Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline," the anonymous document states, a reference to a comment from the first batch of emails that became a rallying point for climate skeptics.

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit -- a key center of climate study and the source of the leaked emails -- immediately issued a statement blasting the release and its timing.

Climategate 2011

White stuff comin' down

The other Penn State investigation

Penn State President Fired
On the same day that Nature published yet another editorial repudiating public examination of the conduct of academic institutions, Penn State President Graham Spanier was fired from his $813,000/year job for failing to ensure that a proper investigation was carried out in respect to pedophilia allegations in Penn State’s hugely profitable football program. The story is receiving massive coverage in North America because the iconic Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, was also fired today.

CA readers are aware of Spanier’s failure to ensure proper investigation of Climategate emails and his untrue puffs about the ineffective Penn State Inquiry Committee, reported at CA here and by the the Penn State Collegian as follows:

Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22. Penn State President Spanier is quoted as saying:

“I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.

Spanier’s claims were totally untrue. Not only did the Inquiry Committee fail to “look at issues from all sides”, they didn’t even interview or take evidence from critics – as they were required to do under the applicable Penn State policy. As I reported at CA at the time:

The only interviews mentioned in the report (aside from Mann) are with Gerry North and Donald Kennedy, editor of Science. [Since they are required to provide a transcript or summary of all interviews, I presume that the Inquiry did not carry out any other interviews.] What does Donald Kennedy know about the matter? These two hardly constitute “looking at issues from all sides”. [A CA reader observed below that "North [at a Rice University event] admitted that he had not read any of the EAU e-mails and did not even know that software files were included in the release.”] They didn’t even talk to Wegman. Contrary to Spanier’s claim, they did not make the slightest effort to talk to any critic or even neutral observer.

Although State Senator Piccola had written to Penn State President Spanier asking him to ensure that “the university must deploy its fullest resources to conduct an investigation of this case”, the Inquiry Committee decided that the investigation committee should not investigate three of the four charges “synthesized” by the inquiry committee and, as a result, despite the request of Piccola and others, no investigation was ever carried out Penn State on any of the key issues e.g the “trick… to hide the decline”, Mann’s role in the email deletion enterprise organised by Phil Jones or the failure to report adverse data which the House Energy and Commerce Committee had asked about (but not investigated by the NAS panel, whose terms of reference were sabotaged by Ralph Cicerone, President of NAS).

The Winter - she is coming

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN SEATTLE HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM
WARNING...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 PM PST TONIGHT. THIS WARNING
REPLACES THE WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW THAT WAS PREVIOUSLY
IN EFFECT.

* AFFECTED LOCATION...MOUNT BAKER.

* ACCUMULATIONS...8 TO 14 INCHES TOTAL OF NEW SNOW IS LIKELY
BEFORE THE STORM ENDS.

The Weather Takes Its Gloves Off--Strong Winds and Mountain Snow
We are now going into a very different, and much more active, weather period--and it starts today!

A strong front is now approaching the Washington coast and it will result in VERY strong winds in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, possible damage (power outages, localized flooding on Whidbey Island), blustery conditions and rain elsewhere, and snow in the mountains. And I don't even want to tell you what the models are suggesting for next weekend.

And now let me tell you something that I shouldn't. The last few model cycles are suggesting a turn to colder temperatures on Thursday and the potential for lowland snow late Thursday or Friday. Too early to be sure at this point...so don't get too excited yet. I went to a meeting run by Seattle DOT this week on winter weather response...these folks are really girding up for battle. And this year they will have the new UW snow-weather application: SNOWWATCH...which I will describe this week.

Update: Friday Nov. 11, 2011 morning
After a brief warmup yesterday, the freezing levels are dropping fast at the mountain and it is currently snowing hard all the way down to White Salmon.

This cooling trend with new snow is consistent with the forecast for this coming weekend and next week; the National Weather Service Forecast Office and Northwest Weather & Avalanche Center are calling for significant winter weather to move down from Alaska and the jet stream to bring a series of winter storms to the North Cascades. Freezing levels should drop below 2,500 feet by Saturday with up to 11 inches of snowfall. This is forecasted to be the beginning of a long period of cool and moist northwesterly flow, bringing below normal temperatures and generally wet conditions (snow in the mountains!) all through next week.

If conditions develop as forecasters are predicting, Mt. Baker could POSSIBLY OPEN AS EARLY AS NEXT THURSDAY, NOV. 17th! Stay tuned here or on our snow report phone line for daily updates.

Al Gore and Bill Nye (Science Guy) busted for falsifying results for film

Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised
Readers may recall my previous essay where I pointed out how Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 Video, used in his “24 hours of climate reality”, had some serious credibility issues with editing things to make it appear as if they had actually performed the experiment, when they clearly did not. It has taken me awhile to replicate the experiment. Delays were a combination of acquisition and shipping problems, combined with my availability since I had to do this on nights and weekends. I worked initially using the original techniques and equipment, and I’ve replicated the Climate 101 experiment in other ways using improved equipment. I’ve compiled several videos. My report follows.

The wheels are coming off

Follow the money - Dr. James Hansen

Hansen rakes it in

Disclosure Obtained by ATI Environmental Law Center Shows the Wealth Keeps Flowing for Dr. James Hansen

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, October 3, 2011
Contact: Paul Chesser, Executive Director, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org

As it waits for the resolution of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit ( http://bit.ly/nnKpxS ) against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which seeks the outside employment permission records of global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center has received the belatedly filed 2010 public financial disclosure of the renowned director of the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

ATI obtained Dr. Hansen’s Form SF 278, which is required to be filed annually, also under the Freedom of Information Act. The disclosure revealed that Dr. Hansen received between $236,000 and $1,232,500 in outside income in 2010 relating to his taxpayer-funded employment, which included:

• Between $26,008 and $72,500 in honoraria for speeches;
• Between $150,001 and $1.1 million in prizes;
• Just under $60,000 in the form of in-kind income for travel to his many outside-income generating activities

The travel reporting marked the first time Hansen detailed such “in-kind” benefits, which included apparent first-class travel for him and his wife on trips to Australia, Japan, and Norway. The new detail raises the question of whether Dr. Hansen wrongly submitted forms in previous years, which he left blank and attested “none” in the space where he is required to report travel expenses taken as part of his outside employment, all in years in which he was busy with numerous paid outside activities of the same sort as he was in 2010.

“Now that Dr. Hansen’s outside income has come under scrutiny, we see a newfound attention to detail on forms where he reports about these sources,” said Christopher Horner, ATI’s director of litigation. “It also shows that Dr. Hansen continues to enjoy a healthy level of earnings that supplement – and for his curious exploitation of – the taxpayer-funded position he holds.”

Arctic ice? Oh Snap!

Reality of sea ice is starting to bite
One problem with ‘global warming’ that scientists and journalists seem to gloss over is that it doesn’t seem to be, well, global. Some areas have exhibited more warming than others.

The Arctic is one area that gets a lot of focus. Each summer the media makes a big deal of the extent of Arctic sea ice melt during the warmest months of the year, focusing on navigation passages and often proclaiming that before long the summer will see all the Arctic ice melt away. The BBC never misses an opportunity to relay the story, even if it is barely mentioned elsewhere, and rolled out the latest iteration of it last week.

However there seems to be a lack of coverage about the increasing extent of sea ice in the winter. With the non stop global warming narrative burned onto the subconscious of decision makers, it the therefore of little surprise that there has been barely any investment in new maritime icebreaking capability.

Always ahead of the game, EU Referendum pointed to this problem in March this year. Richard North reported the former Prime Minister of Estonia Tiit Vähi arguing that the country should urgently order a new icebreaker, “Instead of spending money on buying icebreaking services.” The reason? The country’s two existing icebreakers cannot cope with the “difficult ice conditions” in the Gulf of Finland. Elsewhere, North was an almost solitary voice in the western blogosphere as he reported on shipping trapped in the Sea of Okhotsk by a huge volume of thick sea ice and the subsequent challenging rescue effort.

After increasingly bitter winters that have resulted in more iced over navigation passages, the Swedish government wrote to US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to announce that the icebreaker Oden will be kept at home and not be made available to support the work of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Antarctica, for the first time since 2006.

But it seems the National Science Foundation only has itself to blame for the position it found itself in, for the NSF is responsible for managing the U.S. icebreaking fleet. Under NSF management the US icebreaking fleet has been ‘emasculated’. The American fleet of icebreakers numbers three – for now. It boasted two of the most powerful non-nuclear icebreakers on the seas, Polar Sea and Polar Star, but that changed some years ago. Polar Sea is to be decommissioned next month and Polar Star has been undergoing a re-fit since 2006, but there is speculation it might never to return to service. The third, Healy is not designed for heavy icebreaking of the nature required in Antarctica.

This begs the question, why did the NSF not properly maintain the US icebreaking fleet? Could it be the faith in its own belief that global warming is reducing ice cover and therefore spending money on icebreakers would be a waste? No matter, the NSF was forced into an embarrassing and desperate search for a suitable icebreaking replacement.

Say hello to Katia

Come for the post - stay for the comments

Reasons to be a Global Warming Skeptic
(I ended up writing this as a lengthy answer to someone on Google+ — might as well let the world see it.)
Here’s what I’ve said so far:

“There are few skeptics (I can’t think of any, and I’ve been reporting on this for two solid years and an interested bystander for several years before that) who don’t believe there has been significant warming since the Little Ice Age, or that humans contribute to it, or that additional CO2 or other greenhouse gases aren’t probably part of that contribution.”

Unless one is arguing that humans are the only cause of global warming — in which case i’d have to point to that big glowing thing in the sky during the daytime — what I said explicitly includes a human contribution and even a greenhouse gas contribution.

Now, the IPCC AR4 model is rather stronger than that: it insists that anthropogenic, greenhouse-gas forced warming is the dominant — so dominant that it leads the unthoughtful to turn it into “only” — cause of global warming. For conciseness, call that the AGW model. Reasons I don’t find that hypotheses convincing include:

(4) The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models. Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.

Anthropogenic Global Warming and Clarke's First Law

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

NASA’s James Hansen arrested yet again
Excerpt from Bloomberg:

James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was arrested outside the White House as he joined protesters in urging President Barack Obama to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s $7 billion pipeline.

Before he was taken into custody today, Hansen took a megaphone and implored Obama to act “for the sake of your children and grandchildren.”

“If Obama chooses the dirty needle it will confirm that the president was just green-washing all along,” Hansen, 70, who took a vacation day from his job at the New York based institute to participate in the protest, said in an e-mailed statement.

Goodnight Irene

Irene weakening but

A betting man

Irene update

Say hello to Irene

Hurricane Irene - update

Hello Irene

The UK Met office finally acknowledges the sun's input to our climate

So, will it rain tomorrow?
Noon on Thursday June 9 in the Met Office operations room in Exeter. From desk to ceiling, brightly coloured computer screens show past weather and future predictions. Showers speckle a rainfall radar map of the British Isles. A temperature chart shows tongues of warm orange air sticking into a pool of cool blue over the North Atlantic.

In the middle sits Martin Young, the chief forecaster, facing a dilemma about the weather three days ahead. He has known since the beginning of the week that an Atlantic depression was likely to reach Britain at the weekend, but now, with millions of people making plans, he must issue more specific guidance about when and where the rain is going to fall on Sunday.

The first key ingredient is the fundamental physics of the atmosphere and how it interacts with oceans and land masses to produce weather. This is encapsulated in increasingly sophisticated models, as computing power grows. The £33m Met Office supercomputer – a twinned IBM Power 6 machine installed in 2009 and about to be upgraded – can carry out trillions of calculations a second. It sits in two huge halls, shrouded by what look like plastic shower curtains. These are intended not to preserve the modesty of the energy-guzzling machine but to reduce the need to cool in the immediate vicinity.

For Young’s boss, chief meteorologist Ewen ­McCallum, today’s uncertainty about what will happen in three days’ time illustrates the improvement in forecasting over the past generation. When he joined the Met Office 37 years ago, forecasters frequently faced similar or worse uncertainty about what would happen the next day.

“A four-day forecast today is about as accurate as a one-day forecast was when I started,” says McCallum, in an accent as Scottish as his name. “Then, we had no operational access to weather satellites, no radar and very slow computers.”

Until March last year, the Met Office stuck its neck further out by issuing seasonal forecasts. It stopped after public ridicule following the notorious “barbecue summer” forecast for the damp summer of 2009 and the failure to predict the cold winter of 2009/10.

“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife. With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.

However, some of the recent antagonism is linked to the Met Office’s deserved reputation as a champion of research into climate change – and its scientists’ unrepentant calls for urgent action against man-made global warming.

The upcoming global warming Cooling!

Al Gore needs to check his facts

Ice and Snow Disappearing from Mt. Rainier
June 26, 2011 : 2:57 PM

The effects of the climate crisis are hitting closer and closer to home.

"About 14 percent of the ice and permanent snow atop Washington state's Mount Rainier melted in the past four decades, a new study suggests. Researchers arrived at that figure by comparing the estimated thickness and extent of ice seen in a 1970 aerial survey with those measured in 2007 and 2008. All but two of the 28 glaciers and snowfields on the mountain have thinned and shortened at their lower edges, and the exceptions probably thickened only because large amounts of rock fell upon the ice in recent years and insulated it from warming temperatures."

Deep Snow Delaying Opening of Sunrise Area at Mount Rainier National Park
Too much snow will keep the Sunrise area in Mount Rainier National Park closed through the Fourth of July weekend and until at least July 8, according to park officials. Also, the White River Campground won't open until July 1.

As the accompanying photos show, there really is a lot of snow still waiting to melt away at Sunrise.

Climate Change in the news

Paradise Lost In Mongolia's Arkhangai province, the Tsamba family lives on the edge, struggling through harsh winters alongside their herd of sheep. Severe winter conditions, known as dzud, have been responsible for the deaths of half the family's once 2,000-strong herd over the past three winters. Recently, in search of warmer pastures, the Tsambas moved from Bulgan province in the north to this region near a central Mongolian village called Ulziit.

In the photo above, 29-year-old Erdene Tuya hauls a sheep lost to the dzud to a small burial ground close to their yurt (gher) in March.

BREAKING – major AAS solar announcement: Sun’s Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity
The American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin has just made a major announcement on the state of the sun. Sunspots may be on the way out and an extended solar minimum may be on the horizon.

From Space.com reporting from the conference:

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.

The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

…

Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle’s period of maximum activity. However, the recent findings indicate that the activity in the next 11-year solar cycle, Cycle 25, could be greatly reduced. In fact, some scientists are questioning whether this drop in activity could lead to a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period from 1645 to 1715 when the sun showed virtually no sunspots.

A bit of heavy weather

Thousands lose power after thunderstorms roll by
Powerful thunderstorms rolled across Massachusetts Thursday, leaving thousands without power and bringing hail and wind damage, including to areas devastated by several tornadoes last week, officials said.

Hail that was 1.5 inches in diameter was reported by Montague and Shutesbury residents in Franklin County and .88-inch-diameter hail was seen by a weather spotter in Westfield, where large branches were down, according to preliminary local storm reports on the National Weather Service’s website.

Wind gusts reached 70 miles per hour and knocked down trees in many towns including Longmeadow, West Springfield, and Wayland, according to the weather service in Taunton.

Shortly before 6 p.m., more than 38,000 people had lost power, including 21,530 National Grid customers, 17,202 with Western Massachusetts Electric Co. , and 9,000 NStar users.

Storms Leave Thousands in the Dark
A line of severe storms moved through Connecticut Thursday afternoon, knocking out power to tens of thousands.

At the height of the storm, more than 130,000 Connecticut Light & Power customers were without power. Another 12,000 United Illuminating customers were in the dark.

The areas hardest hit were Bristol, Vernon, Middletown, Suffield, Enfield and Shelton.

The storms dropped golf-ball-sized hail in Norfolk, and hail was also reported in Colebrook and Winsted. In addition to hail, those in the path of the storms should expect heavy rain, high winds and vivid lightning.

David Suzuki? Meet Donna Laframboise

David Suzuki is a Drama Queen
When David Suzuki, Canada’s most prominent environmental activist, looks out on the world he sees nothing but crises. We have a name for people who regard everything as a crisis – we call them drama queens.

While the rest of us approach challenges with determination, optimism, and faith in ourselves as problem solvers, drama queens see only worst-case scenarios. They exaggerate. They emotionalize.

If Suzuki had restricted himself to teaching kids about nature that would be one thing. But instead he has spent decades peddling political opinions about how society should be structured. He has advanced philosophical opinions about how everyone should live.

Year after year, in book after book and newspaper column after column, Suzuki has repeated the same message: Either we follow his personal road map to salvation or all will be lost.

Back in 1990 – 21 years ago – Suzuki’s It’s a Matter of Survival appeared on bookstore shelves. In dramatic fashion it declared:

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization. (p. 1)

That’s quite a statement. I mean, the turning-point-for-human-civilization competition includes events such as the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Magna Carta. It’s likely that some of Suzuki’s readers were veterans of World War II. Did he really mean to imply to those people that the sacrifices their generation made to save the world from Hitler didn’t measure up to the really critical stuff he was certain was about to transpire during the 1990s?

Two days ago a column by Suzuki was published by a Canadian news service (backup link here). It begins:

Humanity is facing a challenge unlike any we’ve ever had to confront. We are in an unprecedented period of change.

Been there, heard that before.

Not just me

Cold, wet spring ruins crops for southwestern B.C. farmers
Expect fewer local vegetables in stores and markets this summer as farmers in southwestern B.C. struggle to recover from a cold, wet and dark spring.

Early field crops such as peas and beans rotted in the ground before they could germinate while small fruits such as strawberries are weeks behind their normal schedule and fruit development has been retarded, said Richmond farmer Bill Zylmans. A shorter growing season will mean lower yields for farmers, a tough blow after heavy rains in September ended last year's growing season a month early and wiped out potato, carrot and beet crops.

"It's been pretty depressing up until today," said Zylmans, who spent a sunny morning Tuesday trying to determine which fields might drain sufficiently to allow planting. "We're three to four weeks behind and these are a crucial three to four weeks."

Corn, cabbages, lettuces and potatoes will all be late arriving on store shelves this summer and the shorter growing season means the harvest will be 20 per cent below normal.

B.C. farm crops are worth about $1.15 billion annually.

"The nugget potatoes would just be arriving in stores about now, that's not going to happen. [Farmers] plant early corn so we see fresh Chilliwack corn in late July, that isn't going to happen," said Zylmans.

Farmers in Richmond and Delta will be rushing to get potatoes in the ground during this week's sunny weather, provided the pools of water covering many of their fields recede in time.

"We're champing at the bit," said Zylmans. "This is on the heels of a disastrous fall and we were really hoping nature would deal us a better spring."

News from the Global Warming front

Heavy snows spoil weekend holiday plans in West
Ski resorts are bustling with activity. A key highway into Yellowstone is closed because parts of the road have seen more than 25 feet of snow. And campgrounds are feverishly removing snow from campsites to clear the way for visitors.

Welcome to Memorial Day weekend in much of the West.

The traditional kickoff of the summer season will have a decidedly wintry feel in the Rocky Mountains, as well as California's Sierra Nevada, because of a lingering record snowfall.

Epic snowpack in parts of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and California is forcing many tourists to abandon the annual rites of launching their summer holidays with a camping trip. Others plan to take advantage of prolonged skiing and snowshoeing this strange spring.

Just wonderful - the upcoming Hurricane season

More on FEMA’s rejection of Texas fire disaster request
The Federal Emergency Management Agency late Tuesday rejected Gov. Rick Perry’s request to declare Texas a major disaster area eligible for additional federal money to fight and recover from the state’s wildland fires. In an announcement, a FEMA spokeswoman explained the agency had determined Texas had already received enough assistance.

EXTENDED RANGE FORECAST OF ATLANTIC SEASONAL HURRICANE ACTIVITY AND LANDFALL STRIKE PROBABILITY FOR 2011
We continue to foresee well above-average activity for the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season. Our seasonal forecast has been reduced slightly from early December, since there is a little uncertainty about ENSO and the maintenance of anomalously warm tropical Atlantic SST conditions. We continue to anticipate an above-average probability of United States and Caribbean major hurricane landfall.

My prayers are going out to the people in the mid-west

Wednesday night's violent storm expected to be ‘off the scale'
The weather Wednesday night is expected to be horrific, frightening and dangerous as a severe storm is expected to race across the metro area at about 50 mph.

Glenn Burns, the chief meteorologist for Channel 2 Action News, said Tuesday evening the “significant tornado parameters” he’s been watching all day Tuesday are “off the scale.”

“When it’s a 1, it means tornadoes are possible. At 3, it means they are likely. Ours is 8 to 11,” Burns said. “All the parameters are there for tornadoes, damaging winds, hail, intense lightning. It very likely we will see some flooding in North Georgia.”

He said people should look for “super cell thunder storms.”

And they should be prepared.

“They need to have a place to go that every family member knows,” Burns said.

The spring weather

Are Northwest Springs Getting Worse?
I have heard two questions over and over again this week:

Are springs getting worse?
Is this the worst spring on record?

Looking at the data one might argue that the answer to both of these is yes.

For me, it starts feeling spring-like when temperatures get over 55F. In the forties and lower fifties there is a chill in the air, but above 55F there is a different feel, and one doesn't need a sweater to work outdoors. Above 55F I can comfortably run in a tee shirt and shorts.

So let me propose a Spring-Fever Index that counts the numbers of days the temperature is above 55F from February 1 to April 14th. Why April 14th? Because today is April 15th! And April 15th (except this strange year) is tax day.

I think you are learning how science is done!

Now here is a plot of my spring-fever index for Seattle-Tacoma Airport from 1948 though 2011....the entire record at this site (thanks go to Neal Johnson of my department for gathering this data):

Click to embiggen...

A bit more of that global warming Climate Change

Avalanche closes westbound Interstate 90 over Snoqualmie Pass
Heavy snowfall, high winds, poor visibility and spun-out vehicles continue to block westbound Snoqualmie Pass from Ellensburg to North Bend. But eastbound lanes reopened after avalanche control work was completed.

About noon, an avalanche about 10 feet deep covered all three westbound lanes of Interstate 90, just west of the summit (milepost 51). The high risk of avalanche danger, in addition to the spun-out vehicles and the heavy snowfall, caused the Department of Transportation to close the pass in both directions.

“Our avalanche team is assessing the risk for more avalanches to occur and it is likely that they will need to do avalanche control work in several locations before we can open the highway,” said Todd Trepanier, DOT South Central Region Maintenance Engineer.

He said snow is falling 2 to 3 inches per hour, with a forecast calling for continued heavy snowfall for the next 36 hours.

The coldest winter I ever saw...

New record low temperatures in San Francisco Bay area
Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather writes:

Based on hourly weather observations a number of minimum temperature records were either set or tied in the Bay Area this morning.

City          Min Temp         Min    Year
San Rafael      28              32 in 1996
Napa            27              30 in 1945
San Francisco   37              37 in 1962
SF Arpt         36              36 in 1971
Oakland         35              38 in 1987
Oakland Arpt    32              34 in 1962
San Jose        33              33 in 1897

These are unofficial values and some sites could be a degree or so lower when the official minima are collected later today.

A look at history

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder
Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter's fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December's blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.

Close to the brink

A few more inches and heaven help Brisbane



Here’s how close to utter disaster Brisbane came during last month’s floods. This is the Wivenhoe dam, built to save the city from flooding, at the moment its operators were desperately trying to lower the levels before it overtopped and parts of the dam gave way.

Reader Bruce explains:

Not many people have seen this picture yet. This is Wivenhoe Dam at its peak, i.e. at 191+% capacity.

Note that the main 5 floodgates are fully open. Note also the spray / white water just visible above the trees beyond the right hand end of the dam wall. This is from the spillway which is cut into the base rock and is out of sight to the right (west) of the wall you can see.

Brisbane dodged a very big wet bullet in those 24 hours, no thanks to Anna Blight and her minions in Queensland water.

This is why those floodgates were turned on full:

These calculations, yet to be tested by SEQWater, show that the urgent release from the dam of huge volumes at unprecedented rates of flow of up to 7500 cubic metres per second, when the operators were gravely concerned late on January 11 that the dam’s rising levels could trigger a collapse of the system, produced most of the flood in the Brisbane River....

Wivenhoe Dam engineering officer Graham Keegan’s ... 20-odd emails - from January 5 until the crisis at the dam had passed late the following week - become urgent in tone early on Tuesday, January 11, with notification that “we are entering conditions where dam safety overrides other concerns - although minimisation of urban flooding remains very important”.

A few hours later at 9.50am he reported “the flood situation has moved into a critical phase”.

Communications with the FOC were difficult, river levels were rising rapidly, and the dam’s flood storage capacity was diminishing.

By that evening, Keegan ...warned that the dam was expected to reach “a maximum level of 75.5m provided no further significant rainfall occurs”.

“This is 0.1m below the trigger level for (an uncontrolled discharge) - this is the major focus of the current release strategy,” Keegan said....

A collapse of Wivenhoe, which would occur from over-topping because of the inflow from the catchment exceeding outflow from the dam’s gates, would be catastrophic. An engineering paper by the dam’s operators a decade ago found that “the population at risk within a distance that would result in less than three hours’ warnings of a dam failure is between 57,000 and 244,000, depending on the time of day and nature of the breach”.

Since a safety upgrade a few years ago, keeping water below three collapsible engineered levee banks, known as “fuse plugs”, is the key to maintaining control of the dam. Should the levels rise to 75.7m and trigger a fuse plug, a very large release occurs to ease pressure, but the outpouring is not controlled by any gate - only by the speed at which the levee or bank is eroded by the water.

The great avoidable flood: an inquiry's challenge
At 12.26pm on Wednesday, January 5, those in the loop for receiving advice on the operations at Wivenhoe Dam received a timely alert.

It was headed "Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Severe Weather Warning - Dam Flood Operations". Its author, Wivenhoe Dam engineering officer Graham Keegan, wanted to ensure that those authorised to receive his emails understood that significant rainfall of 100mm to 200mm "may occur during the next few days".

Relaying information from his colleagues at the dam's Flood Operations Centre (FOC), he added: "Somerset and Wivenhoe Dams are still above (full supply level) and rising slowly due to continuing base-flows from their catchments. As the catchments are still wet it is likely that we will be releasing floodwaters in the near future if BOM's forecasts are accurate. Please be prepared. We will keep you up to date with our plans as this event develops."

Kiss my Yasi

Australians flee as 'catastrophic' Cyclone Yasi approaches
Tens of thousands of Australians have fled their homes, as Cyclone Yasi - predicted to be the worst in Australia's history, nears the Queensland coast. Many residents have also stocked up on food and hunkered down in shelters to protect themselves from the forecast of furious winds, rains and surging seas on a scale unseen there in generations.

Cyclone Yasi was upgraded overnight to a category five storm – the highest possible, and is due to hit near Cairns at about midnight local time.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said the last cyclone of such strength to cross Queensland was in 1918 and advised residents to "just grab each other" and find safety.

"It's such a big storm it's a monster, killer storm," she said. "This impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations."

She warned that the next 24 hours will see extremely dangerous conditions.

"We are facing a storm of catastrophic proportions in a highly populated area," she said. "All aspects of this cyclone are going to be terrifying and potentially very, very damaging.

"Do not bother to pack bags. Just grab each other and get to a place of safety. Remember that people are irreplaceable," she said.

Bligh added that the greatest threat to life could come from tidal surges up to seven metres above normal high tide levels. The storm is due to hit at high tide.

The bureau of meteorology said the impact of cyclone Yasi is likely to be "more life-threatening than any experienced during recent generations".

Cyclone Yasi to hit 26 sugar mills, 4 coastal terminals
The sugar industry in Australia, the world's third-largest exporter, is facing one of its biggest ever disasters in the next 24 hours as Tropical Cyclone Yasi bears down on the prime growing and milling region on the country's northeastern coast.

Yasi will add to the woes of an industry that was battered by poor weather and floods through the key harvesting and crushing period in the latter half of 2010, and it will further affect Queensland, which has only just started to recover from deadly and devastating flooding in southern and central regions over the past month.

At time of publication, Yasi was rated at the highest category-5 level, with winds exceeding 280kph. Yasi is expected to cross the coast between Cairns and Townsville in Queensland around 1300 GMT, after intensifying while travelling westward through the Coral Sea.

Yasi to strip banana crops: farmer
When category four Cyclone Larry tore through their Innisfail banana farm in 2006, Dianne and Frank Sciacca lost 100 per cent of their crop.

Now, after a fight of almost five years to get Pacific Coast Eco Bananas back on track, the pair are once again facing total devastation as Cyclone Yasi looms.

"I literally can't believe it. Yesterday I was in complete denial," Mrs Sciacca said.

"I was literally shaking at different times because the shock starts to hit you."

She predicts their 120,000 banana trees, yielding their distinctive wax-tipped product, will be stripped by midnight tonight - along with every banana tree between Cairns and Ingham.

"This will devastate the whole (banana) industry. There will be nothing standing after midnight tonight - that's a given. It doesn't matter where it hits," she said.

"Any bananas standing between Cairns and Ingham will be gone because you only need 50km/h winds to knock over a banana crop, a pawpaw crop and also cane.

"What you have got to realise is the last nine months we have had constant rain.

"We have had the wettest 2010 ever and all the rooting systems on all these crops is not deep and strong ... because of the soil being wet all the time."

Keep Australia in your prayers the next few days

Cyclone Yasi may hit Cairns: forecasters
Severe tropical cyclone Yasi is on track for a direct hit on Cairns, forecasters say.

But with the cyclone not expected to make landfall until about 1am (AEST) on Thursday, that could still change.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Ann Farrell said the latest modelling showed a direct hit on Cairns was one of the more likely scenarios.

The latest tracking map, issued at 2pm (AEST), marks out the range of possible landfall sites, from as far north as Cooktown to as far south as Townsville.

It features a central track which Ms Farrell said was "one of the more likely tracks" - a line taking Yasi directly into Cairns.

Gulping down gallons of Kool-Aid

Reuters: Republican Party “Actively Caused Climate Collapse”
Reuters News Agency is carrying an extraordinary article claiming that the Republican Party “actively caused climate collapse” and that it is “in the pay of the fossil energy industry”.

The highly unusual story is ostensibly on the subject of the tax that the Australian government plans to levy to cover the costs of the floods in Queensland, but soon veers off into what can most charitably be described as a rambling diatribe on global warming and how the Republicans caused it.

The by-line notes that the piece was provided by the “Matter Network”. The Matter Network Inc.’s ‘About‘ page boasts that it has “recently [been] selected as a leading content provider to Reuters’ Green Business News Service”.

ADVISORY BOARD
R. James Woolsey: Partner, Vantage Point Venture Partners, former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Suzanne Woolsey: Chairman, Rocky Mountain Institute, Former COO, National Academy of Science
Reese Schonfeld: Co-Founder and former President, CNN
J. Scott Briggs: Former President, ZIff-Davis Publishing
Barry Briggs: Former President, C/Net Media
Mike Edelhart: Serial Internet Media Entrepreneur, former CEO Zineo, Executive VP, Ziff Davis Publishing

The Business of Climate Change

Until a few days ago I knew that the US government spent an excessive amount of taxpayer money on climate change research. It was just a general notion; I had read occasional articles showing the funding of certain agencies like NASA but I didn't know many specifics. Then on New Years Day, I wrote a very quick article where I randomly picked a document from a Google search showing funding for climate change. The numbers astonished me. I decided to take a closer look.

Water is wet, fire is hot, night is dark and other scientific discoveries

Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds
Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.

The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.

It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Dr Bodo Bookhagen, Dirk Scherler and Manfred Strecker studied 286 glaciers between the Hindu Kush on the Afghan-Pakistan border to Bhutan, taking in six areas.

Their report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found the key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris – rocks and mud – strewn on their surface, not the general nature of climate change.

Glaciers surrounded by high mountains and covered with more than two centimetres of debris are protected from melting.

Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher.

In contrast, more than 50 per cent of observed glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.

"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level," the authors concluded.

Dr Bookhagen said their report had shown "there is no stereotypical Himalayan glacier" in contrast to the UN's climate change report which, he said, "lumps all Himalayan glaciers together."

A wager

Bastardi’s Wager
Joe Bastardi’s great love is atmospheric science. He says he’s been fascinated by it “since I was a baby. My dad’s a meteorologist, his great-grandfather was the town weatherman in Sicily, and my son wants to be a meteorologist.”

And he’s disturbed by how the science, which he values for its own sake, has been infected with politics. According to Bastardi, the intelligentsia see new weather developments as an “incessant stream of confirmations” of global warming: “I just took out the New York Times from ten years ago, saying the reason it’s not snowing is global warming. Now you’ve got guys in the Times saying the reason it’s snowing is global warming.”

But unlike most climate skeptics, Bastardi is in a position to change the conversation. He’s a meteorologist and forecaster with AccuWeather, and he proposes a wager of sorts. “The scientific approach is you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,” he says. “That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.” Bastardi’s challenge to his critics — who are legion — is to make their own predictions. And then wait. Climate science, he adds, “is just a big weather forecast.”

“Let me tell you something. If I’m right, we’re going to need all the energy we can get. It’s a lot harder to heat a house than cool it, a lot easier to take clothes off than to put them on. So when it cools, we’ll need a lot more energy.”

NASA Sun Spot Number predictions revised again

The solar cycle 24 predicted sunspot maximum has been reduced again – predicted peak down to 59 Max. (1/3/11) http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml

This will be at the level of the Maunder Minimum of 1675 -1715.

Previous NASA predictions below:
■ 2010 October: Predicted peak 60-70
■ 2009 May 29: predicted peak: 80-90 range
■ 2009 Jan 5: predicted peak: 100-110 range
■ 2008 Mar 28: predicted peak: 130-140 range

The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle - and coldest part - of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters. Whether there is a causal connection between low sunspot activity and cold winters has not been proven; however, lower earth temperatures have been observed during low sunspot activity. The winter of 1708-09 was extremely cold.

Bias in the media - LA Times and Global Warming

In Ventura, a retreat in the face of a rising sea
At Surfers Point in Ventura, California is beginning its retreat from the ocean.

Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a 120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life.

The effort by the city of Ventura is the most vivid example to date of what may lie ahead in California as coastal communities come to grips with rising sea levels and worsening coastal erosion. As the coastline creeps inland, scouring sand from beaches or eating away at coastal bluffs, landowners will increasingly be forced to decide whether to spend vast sums of money fortifying the shore or give up and step back.

In California, the sea is projected to rise as much as 55 inches by the end of the century and gobble up 41 square miles of coastal land, according to a 2009 state-commissioned report by the Pacific Institute.

Sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the last century and are expected to swell at an increasing rate as climate change warms the ocean, experts say.

Values for predicted sea level rise over the course of this century typically range from 90 to 880 mm, with a central value of 480 mm. Models of glacier mass balance (the difference between melting and accumulation of snow and ice on a glacier) give a theoretical maximum value for sea level rise in the current century of 2 metres (and a "more plausible" one of 0.8 metres), based on limitations on how quickly glaciers can melt.

Paddling through McDonalds

A wonderful few days to ski

Today...Windy. Rain in the morning...then showers in the afternoon. snow level 5000 feet. Snow accumulation up to 8 inches. Afternoon pass temperatures near 40. West wind in the passes 15 to 25 mph. gusts up to 40 mph this morning. West winds on exposed ridges above 4000 feet 35 to 45 mph with gusts to 75 mph.

Tonight...Showers. Snow level 5000 feet. Snow accumulation up to 5 inches. West wind in the passes 5 to 10 mph.

Saturday...Rain and snow. Snow level 4500 feet. Snow accumulation up to 3 inches. Afternoon pass temperatures near 40. West wind in the passes up to 10 mph.

Saturday Night...Snow and rain. Precipitation may be heavy at times. Snow level 6000 feet. East wind in the passes 10 mph or less.

Sunday...Rain and snow...changing to showers. Snow level 7000 feet. afternoon pass temperatures in the upper 30s. East wind in the passes 5 to 15 mph becoming west near 15 mph in the afternoon.

Sunday Night...Rain and snow. Snow level 5000 feet.

Pan Dome will be closed today and please note that there is currently no cell phone service available at the ski area today. It's a day to test your Gore Tex! We will be in operation out of the White Salmon Base Area today from 9:00 - 3:30.

Forecasts are calling for this warm front and precip to be a bit persistent today but then it looks like we will get lucky, as a break for Saturday is expected.

Be sure to check the snow report throughout the morning for any operation change updates.

Crap - it isn't just Australia

Brazil flood death toll rises to 443, more feared
Rescue workers dug desperately for survivors on Thursday and struggled to reach areas cut off by floods and landslides that have killed at least 443 people in one of Brazil's deadliest natural disasters in decades.

Torrents of mud and water set off by heavy rains left a trail of destruction through the mountainous Serrana region near the city of Rio de Janeiro, toppling houses, buckling roads and burying entire families as they slept.

"It's like an earthquake struck some areas," said Jorge Mario, the mayor of Teresopolis, where 185 people were killed and scores more were feared dead.

More more white stuff

More white stuff

UPDATED: Nearly 71% of the USA is covered in snow
Data from the National Weather Service National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center in Minnesota show that nearly 70 71% of the USA has snow cover.

More white stuff

Significant Snow Event Possible for Seattle, Portland
Substantial snow will return to the Northwest during the middle of next week, threatening to bury not only the mountains and interior, but also the typically rainy cities of Seattle and Portland.

The potential exists for Seattle and Portland to receive significantly more snow next week than each city averages during an entire winter.

Portland typically only records around 4 inches of snow a winter. That number is around seven for Seattle.

The significant snow event will likely unfold Wednesday into Thursday as a moisture-laden Pacific storm slams into the Northwest.

Pacific storms usually are rainmakers for Seattle and Portland since mild air gets funneled overhead. That will not be the case next week as the storm will encounter stubborn arctic air.

Cold weather

Cold Temperatures Overnight In India Kill Five People
Low overnight temperatures in Uttar Pradesh, India, killed five people, raising the number of dead to 41.

Nearly one-fifth of the 180 million people in Uttar Pradesh are homeless. It is one of India's poorest states, according to Fox News.

Despite the efforts of New Delhi officials to convince homeless people to stay in city-run shelters, at least 10 people died of exposure over the past two weeks.

New Delhi had two days of lower-than-normal temperatures. "Tuesday, the low temperature was 39 F and Wednesday's low was 40 F," said AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Frank Strait. "There were winds of 5 to 10 mph."

The average January temperature in New Delhi is 58 F.

Freezing weather leads to south China evacuations
Freezing temperatures have forced the evacuation of nearly 60,000 people from their homes and caused more than $200 million in economic losses in southern China, the government said Wednesday.

Ice and sleet have collapsed the roofs of more than 1,200 homes and forced the evacuation of 58,000 people across the southern regions of Jiangxi, Hunan, Chongqing, Sichuan and Guizhou, the Ministry of Civil Affairs reported.

Freezing weather has also damaged nearly 300,000 acres of crops, including cabbage and rice, and caused about $203.8 million in economic losses across southern China, the ministry said.

In Guizhou province, 22,800 people were forced to evacuate from their homes Tuesday and drivers had to abandon thousands of cars after ice-covered roads were closed, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

"People, especially those living in the mountains and the elderly, are being evacuated from their homes," said a Guizhou Meteorological Bureau official, surnamed Zhao. "Roads and homes with poor infrastructure are being impacted by the icy conditions."

BOHICA - Northeast weather

Winter Returns to Great Lakes, Northeast after Brief Thaw
Winter will re-establish itself across the Great Lakes and Northeast in the form of snow, gusty winds and frigid temperatures after a brief thaw over the last week.

Less than a week after up to 30 inches of snow buried portions of New York and New Jersey, the snowcover has nearly disappeared thanks to multiple days of temperatures in the 40s and 50s. New York City had a snow cover of 20 inches on Dec. 27, and as of the end of the day Monday, less than 6 inches remained.

New reports of snowfall and a case of serious Scope Creep

Australia swaps summer for Christmas snow
Snow and ice covering buildings and cars on December 19, 2010 at Mount Hotham,Victoria, as snow fell in Australia. The usual hot and summery December weather was replaced in parts by icy gusts sweeping up from the Southern Ocean, giving the country a taste of a white Christmas. Snow has fallen in parts of east coast states New South Wales and Victoria.

Snow fell in Australia on Monday, as the usual hot and summery December weather was replaced in parts by icy gusts sweeping up from the Southern Ocean, giving the country a taste of a white Christmas.

Snow has fallen in parts of east coast states New South Wales and Victoria, leaving ski resorts — some of which are usually snow-free at this time of year — with dumps of up to 10 centimetres (four inches).

“It’s white, everything is white,” Michelle Lovius, the general manager of the Kosciuszko Chalet Hotel at Charlotte Pass told AFP.

Department of Homeland Security goes off the deep end – now plans to battle “climate change” in addition to terrorists
Not content to keep to the terrorism prevention mission for which they were founded, DHS’s Janet Napolitano now plans to battle a religious war of “climatic jihad”. Here’s what happened the last time Washington DC took on weather in February 2010 (but not climate). The capital was shut down of course. Now that’s “environmental justice”. Look for pat downs at airports soon for those carrying concealed carbonated beverages.

Heh - Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.

Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

Anthropogenic Global Warming - the Russian perspective

For Russia, Global Warming Benefits 'Outweigh' Negatives
Global warming in the next 40 years will allow Russian authorities to save on central heating, increase agricultural production and extend sea navigation in the north, a leading Russian climatologist told a Russian-German conference Wednesday.

But authorities will have to fork out money to reconstruct several big Siberian and Far Eastern cities to prevent them from collapsing as a result of a warmer climate, Vladimir Klimenko, head of Laboratory of Global Power Engineering Problems at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute told the conference co-organized by Alexander von Humbolt Foundation.

However, "the reduction of heating alone outweighs all the negative results [of the global warming] by many times," Klimenko said. If the money saved through reducing heating "is spent sensibly, then something can be achieved," he said.

Klimenko based his English-language report on the findings of his laboratory.

Climate was discussed elsewhere Tuesday. The World Meteorological Organization said during the annual UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, that scorching heat waves that killed thousands of people in Europe in 2003 and that choked Russia earlier this year were set to appear like an average summer in the future as the Earth continued to warm.

Stormy weather

New Cold Blast Invading Eastern U.S. Even More Brutal
While not everyone across the eastern half of the country is dealing with snow or a blizzard this weekend, they will all be facing brutal cold soon if not already.

The coldest air of the season yet is headed for these regions and could end up being the coldest of the entire winter. Many records, especially nighttime lows across the Southeast, will be broken early this week.

Painfully cold, arctic air sweeping across the Midwest has already been driving temperatures well-below zero. Temperatures will remain or plunge back below zero in the Upper Midwest with lows between 10 and 20 below zero across much of Iowa, Minnesota, western Wisconsin and the eastern Dakotas tonight.

Tonight into Monday, the bitter cold will overspread the rest of the eastern half of the country, creating a flash freeze in many places where a storm has made roads wet or slushy. While actual temperatures may not fall below zero, horrendous winds will make it feel that way for millions.

News from the Global Warming front:

Lethal cold weather grips northern Europe
Heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures have been causing another day of disruption to northern Europe and its transport network.

Thousands of railway passengers had to spend the night in trains in Germany as snow paralysed many high-speed inter-city routes.

Flights were disrupted in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

In Poland, 18 people have died from exposure over the past two days.

Waking up and smelling the cherry blossoms

Breaking: Japan refuses to extend Kyoto treaty at Cancun
Talks threatened with breakdown after forthright Japanese refusal to extend Kyoto emissions commitments
* John Vidal guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 December 2010 18.16 GMT

Japan refuses to extend Kyoto protocol. ‘The forthrightness of the statement took people by surprise,’ said one British official

The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancún suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international treaty that commits most of the world’s richest countries to making emission cuts.

The Kyoto protocol was adopted in Japan in 1997 by major emitting countries, who committed themselves to cut emissions by an average 5% on 1990 figures by 2012.

However the US congress refused to ratify it and remains outside the protocol.

The brief statement, made by Jun Arima, an official in the government’s economics trade and industry department, in an open session, was the strongest yet made against the protocol by one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

He said: “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances.”

Reality bites, when Japan says something so blunt, you know they mean it – Anthony

What sound does the first domino make?

A little global warming would be a good thing

UK WEATHER: NINE PENSIONERS DIE FROM THE COLD IN UK EVERY HOUR
The number of deaths linked to the cold between December and March reached 25,400 in England and Wales, with another 2,760 in Scotland.

The figures are equivalent to nine deaths every hour.

The total gave Britain the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse than much colder countries such as Finland and Sweden.

There are fears the death toll could increase this year following energy price rises which may frighten elderly people into not turning on their heating.

Michelle Mitchell, of Age UK, said: “It’s unacceptable that tens of thousands more older people die in this country every winter from the effects of the cold weather. The fact that the UK has one of the highest winter mortality rates in Europe makes it clear this is very much a home-grown problem.

“Behind these statistics lie deep-seated social issues, such as one in three over-60s living in houses which fail the ‘decent home’ standard.”

A bit slick

Cold outside

One year ago today

ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently - I have no memory of this at all - we're not doing observed rain days! It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

Climategate, a year of comedy.
It has been almost a year now since the UEA emails known as climategate were revealed. What has followed has been a year of hilarity as one scandal after another followed. Just think about how funny it was when Pachuri (head of the IPCC) published his sex book, Mann publishing one self exonerating editorial after another all to try and prevent Cuccinelli from getting the other 12,000 emails publicly released. Just how did the IPCC accidentally transpose the time when the Himalayan glaciers would vanish from 2350 to 2035 and fail to change it when notified (don’t worry the glaciers will be there in 2350 and in 2035 becaus these guys don’t really know). “Scientific”Applause for Chavez’s hitleresque anti-capitalist rant in Copenhagen! hahaha. I’ve been laughing almost daily as these guys trip over themselves trying to make the case for global CO2 governance. The politicians are starting to realize that the whole topic is poison for their careers and if nothing else, climategate has had the fortunate effect of at least slowing the implementation of stupidity.

Green energy which costs you more to ‘create’ jobs. How insane a world, and how funny when the politicians realize they can’t push that lie on the public. Nobody in America believes that anymore, well at least not as many.

Climategate taught different people different lessons though. Instead of journals opening up and allowing the reasonable moderate AGW science to be published, they tightened their unofficial policies forcing the non-anointed to go through endless reviews before rejection. Countless hours are spent by those who would publish moderate work in the face of extremist AGW claims. But it is funny!! Apparently climate science believes humans can control not only the planetary temperature but the laws of physics as well! A year of laughter is what it was, ships that pump moisture into the air to make clouds and ‘cool the planet’, the US military asked about what effort’s they are making to insure that the WAR is emitting less CO2. I even recently had a conversation with a scientist about the CO2 emission of photovoltaic cells!!!

While I am pleased with the Air Vent’s role in expanding climate discussion beyond the sheltered walls of government and university hallways, we need to remember that some individual/s took a great risk to release those emails. They get the credit for an event which changed the political future of the world but it is a lonely credit as nobody can know who they are. The lesser role of climate blogs was to provide both the indirect impetus for action and a necessary outlet for the emails to be presented to the public in raw form and then put into context. I hope those involved in the actual release are wise enough to continue not discussing their own roles in the release as I’m sure plenty of people are still hunting them down, waiting for a clue to surface. After a year, the discussion as to what the emails meant continues, so much so that even the word climategate has become widely known.

Long winter - trifecta

Russia's Kamchatka volcanoes spew giant ash clouds
Two volcanoes erupted Thursday on Russia's far-eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, tossing massive ash clouds miles (kilometers) into the air, forcing flights to divert and blanketing one town with thick, heavy ash.

The Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Eurasia's highest active volcano, exploded along with the Shiveluch volcano, 45 miles (70 kilometers) to the northeast, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry's branch in Kamchatka said, adding that flights in the area had to change course.

Ash clouds from the remote volcanoes billowed up to 33,000 feet (10 kilometers) and were spreading east across the Pacific Ocean, vulcanologist Sergei Senyukov told Rossiya 24 television. Streams of lava flowed down the slopes of Shiveluch.

Anthony gets 'disinvited'

The season of disinvitation continues: Chico State University can’t handle a slideshow
I wrote back on September 28th about how Dr. Roger Pielke Senior and Dr. Bob Carter had been invited to present their views on climate science, then after the organizers found out what might be discussed, redacted the invitations to these scientists.

We also recently saw another example of how a “great debate” on climate had been staged by a Hollywood heavyweight, director James Cameron, who backed out of a debate with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano at the last minute, after Morano was already in the air and en-route to the debate. He’s now been dubbed “Titanic chicken of the sea” for saying things like James Cameron boldly slammed global warming skeptics as “swine” on the day he was supposed to be debating them. “I think they’re swine” Also see: Director James Cameron Unleashed: Calls for gun fight with global warming skeptics: ‘I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads’ then not having the guts to actually follow through with a debate that he set up in the first place. All bark, no bite.

After all that…. guess what?

I was invited by Chico State University to the Great Debate Oct 28th in the City council Chambers on the topic of the Proposition 23, delay of California Prop32, the “global warming law”. I accepted with a caveat, but due to that caveat I’ve now joined the club of the “disinvited”. My crime? Wanting to show some slides to go along with my oral presentation.

A bit of a cold one

Snow to hit Britain
The cold snap will seem worse after temperatures soared to 75F (23C) last weekend.

Forecasters warned snow is due in Scotland and possibly northern England next week, with frost as far south as southern England, which will see bitter 48F (9C) daytime maximum temperatures.

“A northerly air stream in the middle part of next week means coldest conditions will probably be in Scotland, with sleet or snow showers and snow settling on higher ground,” said forecaster Brian Gaze of independent forecasters The Weather Outlook.

“Even southern England will feel distinctly chilly."

Forecasters Positive Weather Solutions have already predicted a ‘white-out’ winter almost as harsh as last winter - with widespread snow, temperatures down to -4F (-20C) and transport chaos.

The Weather Outlook, which has an accurate seasonal forecasting record, warned the UK is now being gripped by a bitter series of winters comparable with the harsh 1939-42 winters which made conditions so horrendous during the Second World War.

Last winter was the coldest for 31 years, with an average UK-wide temperature of just 34F (1.5C).

A spot of cold

Coldest winter in 1,000 years on its way
After the record heat wave this summer, Russia's weather seems to have acquired a taste for the extreme.

Forecasters say this winter could be the coldest Europe has seen in the last 1,000 years.

The change is reportedly connected with the speed of the Gulf Stream, which has shrunk in half in just the last couple of years. Polish scientists say that it means the stream will not be able to compensate for the cold from the Arctic winds. According to them, when the stream is completely stopped, a new Ice Age will begin in Europe.

Snow hits farmers big time
Following a reasonably benign winter, the Southland region of New Zealand (NZ) has in the past week been hit by “the worst spring storm in living memory” according to the NZ Herald.

Six days of blizzards have caused deaths among new lambs numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and raised concern over the welfare of ewes yet to lamb.

Besides the effect of the cold weather itself, the continued snowfall has not allowed snow on the ground to thaw, making it much harder for stock to feed.

This makes ewes about to lamb particularly susceptible to metabolic illnesses from a lack of nutrients.

Winning hearts and minds

Staring down the barrel of a gun

The First Atmospheric River of the Season


Some of the most important wintertime weather features of our region are the plumes of moisture that stream northeastward out of the tropics and subtropics. In the discipline these plumes are often called "atmospheric rivers" and the atmospheric river that is often discussed in the media is the "pineapple express." This weekend the first major atmospheric river of the season will strike our region, specifically central and northern Vancouver Island and adjacent portions of British Columbia.

Here is a recent computer forecast of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (the fancy name is "column-integrated water vapor"--throw that around and you will impress your friends!) for 11 AM on Saturday. The blues are high values-see the atmospheric river?

The plumes of atmospheric moisture associated with these rivers is usually associated with warm temperatures--in fact it HAS to be that way, because only warm air can hold large amounts of water vapor. When this warm juicy air strikes our mountains it is forced to rise--the result being large amounts of precipitation. Want to see what the models are going for? Here is the forecast 24-h rainfall ending 5 PM on Sunday. The reds are FIVE TO TEN INCHES OF RAIN! There is even a white area, where more than 10 inches is predicted.

All that Global Warming?

White House: Global Warming Out, 'Global Climate Disruption' In
From the administration that brought you "man-caused disaster" and "overseas contingency operation," another terminology change is in the pipeline.

The White House wants the public to start using the term "global climate disruption" in place of "global warming" -- fearing the latter term oversimplifies the problem and makes it sound less dangerous than it really is.

White House science adviser John Holdren urged people to start using the phrase during a speech last week in Oslo, echoing a plea he made three years earlier. Holdren said global warming is a "dangerous misnomer" for a problem far more complicated than a rise in temperature.

John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet
Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States' Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force.

Impossible, you say? That must be an exaggeration or a hoax. No one in their right mind would say such things.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it is no hoax, no exaggeration. John Holdren really did say those things, and this report contains the proof. Below you will find photographs, scans, and transcriptions of pages in the book Ecoscience, co-authored in 1977 by John Holdren and his close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. The scans and photos are provided to supply conclusive evidence that the words attributed to Holdren are unaltered and accurately transcribed.

Truckin' right along

My name is Earl

The Mann, et. al. Hockey Stick snapped

The McShane and Wyner Gordie Howe Treatment Of Mann
Many—as in lots and lots—of folks wrote in and asked me to review the McShane and Wyner paper. Thanks!

Gordie Howe -- Mr Hockey to you -- didn’t need his stick, his hockey stick, to plaster his opponents against the boards. Nor did he have to wave his blade, Tim-Dr. Hook-McCracken style, in order to fill the other team with fear. No, sir. Old Number 9 relied almost solely on his elbows to raise temperatures on the ice and score goals.

Statistically speaking, McShane and Wyner emulate Howe by applying a forearm check to the throat to Mann’s proxy reconstruction of temperature, cracking his hockey stick irreparably, leaving his models sprawling on the ice.

Like old school players, McShane and Wyner start with a little trash talking, albeit using sophisticated phrasing: “In fact, Li et al. (2007) is highly unusual in the climate literature in that its authors are primarily statisticians.” And they quote Boss Wegman—who once picked on me, publicly in print, for being a prof. at a med. school, but I hold him no grudge; just don’t let me get him out on the ice—”While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with university-level, professional statisticians.” The authors also show off their team, my pal Tilmann Gneiting, as well as Larry Brown and Dean Foster, all men of statistical brilliance.

But we can tell these taunts were included as a matter of form, thrown in because it is traditional. They don’t spend much time on them, and instead focus their efforts where it counts, exploiting Mann’s huge, gaping statistical five hole.

There’s little point in summarizing the statistical methods the pair use to pummel Mann: the paper is not especially difficult and can be read by anybody. It’s also so that the boys haven’t said much new, but what they do say, they say well and plainly. It’s the sheer spectacle that’s worth attending to.

Our warming planet

Temperatures continue well below average in Southern California
It hasn't been the coolest summer on record, but it's been close, forecasters say.

The average temperature in July was 79 degrees, five degrees below normal, and the first eight days of this month also have been five to six degrees below normal, weather experts said.

"We normally get this kind of weather pattern when we are transitioning from an El Niño year to a La Niña year," National Weather Service meteorologist Jaimie Meier said. "It sets up this trough of moisture over the West Coast, and that's what's been happening. We end up with cooler-than-normal temperatures and cooler coastal waters."

OK - one item caught my eye

Has any minister in history seemed more hopelessly unfit to do his job?
The penny is fast dropping that by far the most disastrous appointment made by David Cameron to his Coalition Cabinet was that of the ultra-green, Lib Dem millionaire Chris Huhne as our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain's energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.

As was only too predictable, the overall theme of Mr Huhne's message was that 'climate change is the greatest global challenge we face'.

We must do everything we can and more to cut down very drastically on our 'carbon emissions', as we are now legally committed to do by the Climate Change Act - at a cost of £18 billion a year.

But in the real world, the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close.

The headline answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.

As a 24-carat green ideologue, he is viscerally opposed to replacing the ageing nuclear and coal-fired plants which currently provide us with more than half our electricity.

Ta Ta, Tata
The UK may be waving goodbye to Tata Steel and some other large industrial concerns as the government piles on more green costs, making it almost impossible for global businesses based there to compete.

Companies including Tata Steel Ltd. and GrowHow U.K. Ltd. may leave the U.K. as climate-protection policies boost electricity and natural-gas costs.

Factories will pay 18 percent to 141 percent more for gas, electricity and carbon-reduction programs by 2020, adding about 7 million pounds ($11 million) to the bill for a typical large energy consumer, the London-based Energy-Intensive Users Group and Britain’s Trades Union Congress said in a report on the impact of climate policy released today.

“The combined impact of the government’s climate change policies is imposing significant costs on the U.K.’s energy- intensive industries, and without urgent review could see some companies leaving the U.K. for good,” according to the report.

…

It’s the second report this month suggesting potential job losses in Britain because of climate policy.

Pat Sajak on Global Warming

Manmade Global Warming: The Solution
Pat Sajak

Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized. Each side has dug in its heels and has accused the other of acting irresponsibly and dishonestly. For the believers, the other side has become the equivalent of Holocaust deniers; and for the doubters, the other side has become a cult intent on manipulating mankind to remake the world in some sort of natural Utopian image.

The divide has become so great, it seems virtually impossible to bridge the gap. However, I’m not writing for Ricochet merely to outline problems; I’m here to offer real solutions. And I’m not just blowing carbon dioxide.

Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.

Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.

Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.

How about it? Why wait for governments to change us? You who have already seen the light have it within your grasp to act in concert with each other and change the world forever. And I hate to be a scold, but you have a special obligation to do it because you believe it so strongly. Then, instead of looking at isolated tree rings and computer models, you’d have real results to point to, and even the skeptics would see the error of their ways and join you.

So start Tweeting each other and get the ball rolling. We’ll anxiously await results. See, I told you I had the solution. My work here is done.

Waxman/Markey climate regulation

Waxman Malarkey 3: Impact Zone Alaska
Once again, I return to that endless font of misinformation, the Waxman Markey website. In this case, I look at their claims about Alaska. This one will be short and sweet.

The Waxman Markey website page on Alaska says:

Over the past 50 years, Alaska has warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, much more than anywhere in the lower 48 states. This dramatic temperature change is causing the landscape of Alaska to change faster than anywhere else in the United States, threatening infrastructure, wildlife, and Native Alaskan culture.

I fear that these numbers must from the well-known Government Misinformation Agency.

There are a few things we can see here. First, Fig. 1 clearly shows the dependence of Alaska temperatures on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is a long-term shift in Pacific sea surface temperatures. The PDO has a warm phase and a cool phase, as shown in Figure 3. It shifts from one phase to the other every thirty years or so.

The PDO shifted to the cool phase in the late 1940s. It went back to the warm phase in 1976-77. And recently, it has gone back to the cool phase. This is clearly visible in the Alaska temperatures. As much as Waxman Markey wants to blame the shift in Alaskan temperatures on “global warming”, the science says otherwise. The changes are due to the shifts in the PDO.

The department of Recursion - hide the hide the decline

The MET Office and computer models

Volcanic ash cloud: Met Office blamed for unnecessary six-day closure
The government agency was accused of using a scientific model based on “probability” rather than fact to forecast the spread of the volcanic ash cloud that made Europe a no-fly zone and ruined the plans of more than 2.5 million travellers in and out of Britain.

A senior European official said there was no clear scientific evidence behind the model, which air traffic control services used to justify the unprecedented shutdown.

Eleven major British airlines joined forces last night to publicly criticise Nats, the air traffic control centre, over the way it interpreted the Met Office’s “very limited empirical data”.

The Met Office super computer by numbers
Here is a rundown of the Met Office super computer by numbers:

:: The £30 million computer – more powerful than 100,000 standard PCs – was installed in the Met Office's new £80 million headquarters in May.

:: It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists.

:: The computer uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power a small town.

:: In terms of pollution the computer produces 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.

:: This makes the Met Office building one of the most polluting public buildings in the UK as 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer.

Debunking that pesky Medieval Warming Period

Another indication of MWP and LIA being global
From CO2 Science, another peer reviewed paper with a paleoclimatology reconstruction based on cores containing plankton shells, show that both the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) can be seen in Indonesia. In the past, critics have said these events to be “regional” implying they occurred only around Europe, due to lack of historical records in other regions of the world.

Since the Oxygen18 isotope dating method seems well proven, it would seem this study has a good basis for its claims. Even RC’s Gavin Schmidt likes it.

Co2 Science writes:
From the authors’ Figure 2b, adapted below, we calculate that the Medieval Warm Period was about 0.4°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.

Color me surprised - NOT!

Academic experts clear scientists in 'climate-gate'
In the second of three investigations of the scandal known as "climate-gate," a panel of academic experts said Wednesday that several prominent climate scientists did not engage in deliberate malpractice but did not use the best statistical tools available to produce their findings.

The University of East Anglia's Climactic Research Unit has been under intense scrutiny since November, when hackers posted more than 1,000 pirated e-mails and a raft of other documents that highlight the scientists' hostility toward global warming skeptics. But the review -- which follows a British parliamentary review that defended the institution's research but faulted its tendency to withhold information -- did nothing to bridge the divide between many climate researchers and their critics.

After interviewing staff members and analyzing 11 peer-reviewed articles published between 1986 and 2008, the panel concluded: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."

They also said it was "very surprising" that the researchers did not work more closely with statisticians. But, they added, it was "not clear" that "better methods would have produced significantly different results."

So, to station counts. These will have to mirror section 3 above. Coverage of secondary parameters is particularly difficult - what is the best approach? To include synthetic coverage, when it's only at 2.5-degree?

No. I'm going to back my previous decision - all station count files reflect actualy obs for that parameter only. So for secondaries, you get actual obs of that parameter (ie naff all for FRS). You get the info about synthetics that enables you to use the relevant primary counts if you want to. Of course, I'm going to have to provide a combined TMP and DTR station count to satisfy VAP & FRS users. The problem is that the synthetics are incorporated at 2.5-degrees, NO IDEA why, so saying they affect particular 0.5-degree cells is harder than it should be. So we'll just gloss over that entirely ;0)

ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently - I have no memory of this at all - we're not doing observed rain days! It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

CO2 is plant (and Coral) food

CO2 is an odorless, invisible, and non-flammable gas. It is also safe for humans in the maximum concentrations recommended for plant growth. The average level of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 300 PPM (parts per million). If the level decreases down below 200 PPM in an enclosed growing area, plant growth slows to a halt. Through the years of testing and research, the optimum enrichment level of CO2 for plant growth has been agreed to be about 1500 PPM. With CO2 enrichment, under good conditions, plant growth rates and flowering will increase 20-100%. CO2 can be used from seedling right through harvest.

In marine and reef aquariums, a calcium reactor is a device used to create a balance of alkalinity in the system.

A wonderful dialogue - Climate scientist v/s Climate skeptic

First, I would like to thank Dr. Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for answering the questions I had posed (and had given my own personal answers) in “Trust and Mistrust”. I found his replies to be both temperate and well-reasoned. Also, I appreciate the positive and considerate tone of most of those who commented on his reply. It is only through such a peaceful and temperate discussion that we can come to understand what the other side of the debate thinks.

Onwards to the questions, Dr. Meier’s answers, and my comments:

Question 1. Does the earth have a preferred temperature, which is actively maintained by the climate system?

Willis says that he “believes the answer is yes”. In science “belief” doesn’t have much standing beyond initial hypotheses. Scientists need to look for evidence to support or refute any such initial beliefs. So, does the earth have a preferred temperature? Well, there are certainly some self-regulating mechanisms that can keep temperatures reasonably stable at least over a certain range of climate forcings. However, this question doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the issue of climate change and anthropogenic global warming. The relevant question is: can the earth’s temperature change over a range that could significantly impact modern human society?

My comment: Since unfortunately so little attention has been given to this important question, my idea of how it works is indeed a hypothesis. Therefore, “belief” is appropriate. However, I have provided several kinds of evidence in support of the hypothesis at the post I cited in my original answer to this question, “The Thermostat Hypothesis”.

Next, Dr. Meier says that there are “some self-regulating mechanisms that can keep temperature reasonably stable at least over a certain range of climate forcings.” Unfortunately, he does not say what the mechanisms might be, at what timescale they operate, or what range of forcings they can handle.

However, he says that they can safely be ignored in favor of seeing what the small changes are, which doesn’t make sense to me. Before we start looking at what causes the small fluctuations in temperature that we are discussing (0.6°C/century), we should investigate the existence and mechanism of large-scale processes that regulate the temperature. If we are trying to understand a change in the temperature of a house, surely one of the first questions we would want answered is “does the house have a thermostat?” The same is true of the climate.

A bit of hail

Runners Caught Outside As Hail Storm Hits
Four Grinnell College students out for a run Tuesday were caught outside in a hail storm and had to be taken to the hospital.

Pat Crawford told KCCI that she and her husband were driving near Grinnell when they found one of the students along the road.

"We saw right up here, there was a kid in the road looking like he was flagging things down. And you could tell he was a runner because he had the running shorts on, he was barefooted, and he looked pretty beat up," said Crawford.

The student told Crawford that he, another man and two women tried to hide in a ditch when the storm hit, but they were forced to seek shelter when the hail became too intense. They were also worried they might drown as water started flooding into the ditch.

"They thought it was a tornado, which a lot of us thought it was a tornado. So they laid in the ditch, which was a good idea but they were just getting the tar beat out of them and the ditches were filling with water, so they knew they couldn't stay there," said Crawford.

Seeing the writing on the wall -- energy production

For First Time, Energy Trumps Hippies
What happens in economic lean times? It helps clarify the mind on how we spend scarce resources and, in particular, it forces us to reconsider costly “feel good” environmentalist policies.

So it’s not entirely surprising to get the news from Gallup that “Americans are more likely to say the U.S. should prioritize development of energy supplies than to say it should prioritize protecting the environment, the first time more have favored energy production over environmental protection in this question’s 10-year history.”

Click to embiggen...

A spot of weather in the East

Sewage plants overwhelmed; residents, retailers left reeling
The worst arrived in the early hours of Wednesday, an indomitable force of water creeping ever higher through the darkness. Thousands of tired homeowners watched their basement steps incrementally vanish beneath it. Soaked National Guardsmen along Route 95 in Warwick saw it spill over the sandbags they had worked for hours to stack.

By dawn, the unparalleled flood had transformed the Rhode Island landscape into islands of isolation, the region’s web of roadways broken, whole sections of neighborhoods stranded and without power.

Gridlock greeted thousands of commuters weaving like mice through a maze of alternate routes around Route 95, the state’s most vital transportation artery, closed in Warwick by the flooding Pawtuxet River.

And with a half-dozen sewage treatment plants compromised or overwhelmed by the most destructive flood in the state’s recorded history, officials braced for an environmental disaster with huge public health and financial ramifications.

Governor Carcieri shut down state government and urged people to stay home. In the epicenter of grief –– the Pawtuxet River basin where hundreds of homes were already submerged –– the water continued to rise to levels never before seen.

About that island that disappeared recently

The birth and death of an island in the Bay of Bengal
In 1970, the Bay of Bengal was struck by the very powerful Bhola Cyclone. This was a truly disastrous event with a casualty in the order of 500,000 people. This event also caused severe coastal damage. Vast quantities of sediment were set in suspension, and there were significant turbidity flows.

At the boarder between India and Bangladesh, these sediments transported down the river accumulated in a muddy sand-bar that grew into an island. This newly-created island came to be called South Talpatti or New Moore Island.

There is nothing strange in this. Islands come and go for local reasons triggered by sudden events and longer-term dynamic forces.

On 25 March, 2010, it was suddenly announced that the island had disappeared. Many, including scientists (for example Sugata Hazra, professor in oceanography at Jadavpur University in Calcutta), took the island’s disappearance as an expression of a rapidly rising sea level.

The fact, however, is that it has nothing to do with any global sea level rise, but is attributable to local dynamic factors operating in this part of the Bay of Bengal.

So, the Island of South Talpatti (New Moor Island) was born in 1970 and killed in 2010. The island had a short lifetime of only 40 years. The ultimate cause of its birth was cyclone damage. The cause of its death is likely to be local dynamic influences operating in this part of the huge delta, and it is surely not an effect of a rapid global sea-level rise.

Over the last 40 years we record a virtually fully stable eustatic sea level, even in the Sundarban delta of Bangladesh. The disappearance of the island is by no means a sign of global sea-level rise.

Grasping at straws - Climate Change and the Court System

Global Warming Advocates Threaten Blizzard of Lawsuits
Environmentalists, unable to squeeze "cap and trade" rules through the U.S. Senate, have a new strategy for combating what they believe is man-made global warming:

They're going to sue.

They're revving up their briefs and getting ready to shop for judges who will be sympathetic to their novel claim that the companies they believe contribute to global warming are a "public nuisance."

The environmentalists allege that individual companies are responsible for climate change because they have emitted greenhouse gases during the course of their operations. Those gases, they say, have "harmed" them by fostering Hurricane Katrina, eroding the shorelines of America's coasts and causing global warming.

"People have a right to sue for redress of grievances," said Lee A. DeHihns III, a partner with law firm Alston & Bird's environmental and land development group and a former associate general counsel with the EPA. He said global warming is a "public nuisance," just like a neighbor with a loud stereo. "You can sue for an intentional infliction of harm, a nuisance," said DeHihns, whose firm is consulting with defendants in these types of cases.

The lawyers seek a "consent decree," an agreement from the defendants to stop causing global warming -- even though the theory that mankind causes global warming is hardly settled science.

Clarke's three laws - #1 in action

James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change
Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists' emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. "The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Gerard Van der Leun gets an article in Penthouse

An Inconvenient Fraud?
It was good to be Al Gore in the last part of the last decade. In the year 2000 he was the world’s biggest loser. By 2009 he was one of the world’s biggest winners after becoming the master of disaster. Flummoxed by his noninvention of the internet and his nonelection as president of the United States, Gore found a winning hand in predicting the end of the world. In the process, he received an Oscar for his film An Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize, and millions of dollars through his interests in companies that dealt in “carbon credits.” Gore became more of a “Comeback Kid” than Bill Clinton ever was. For most of 2009, it was still good to be King Al. But late in the year, Al Gore’s beloved internet betrayed him.

On November 17, 2009, someone, somewhere, copied some 4,000 emails and documents from a password-protected server at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in England and put them up on a free and open server in Russia for all the world to read. Whoever made these documents available was an unknown soldier of the truth. Taking the handle of FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), he or she stated, “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it. This is a limited time offer, download now.”

Whether the “Deep Throat” who leaked the emails was a hacker or a mole within the CRU, he or she had an exquisite sense of timing. The files were made public just before the Copenhagen climate summit. The CRU had been one of the central institutions involved in promulgating the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (i.e., the Earth is getting dangerously warmer than ever before in history and people are the primary force behind this threatening rise). Now it had become instrumental in the theory’s unraveling.

Talk about unmitigated bullsh*t

Liberal Activist Says 'Cognitive' Brain Patterns Prevent Conservatives From Accepting Threat of Global Warming
Proponents of human-caused global warming claim that "cognitive" brain function prevents conservatives from accepting the science that says "climate change" is an imminent threat to planet Earth and its inhabitants.

George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley and author of the book "The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics," says his scientific research shows that how one perceives the world depends on one’s bodily experience and how one functions in the everyday world. Reason is shaped by the body, he says.

Lakoff told CNSNews.com that “metaphors” shape a person's understanding of the world, along with one’s values and political beliefs -- including what they think about global warming.

"It relates directly (to global warming) because conservatives tend to feel that the free market should be unregulated and (that) environmental regulations are immoral and wrong," Lakoff said.

"And what they try to do is show that the science is wrong and that the argument is wrong, based on the science. So when it comes back to science, they try to debunk the science," Lakoff said.

On the other hand, he added, liberals' cognitive process allows them to be "open-minded."

But Pat Michaels, a former professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the argument that opponents of human-caused global warming are physically or psychologically different reveals "desperation" on the part of those who want people to not only embrace the idea of human destruction of the environment but put that idea into laws regulating human activity.

"Imminent disaster serves the proponents of regulation on this issue," Michaels told CNSNews.com. That includes efforts by Democrats in Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which would limit carbon emissions and tax corporations who fail to meet government-set pollution standards.

"This line of authority is a policy response where the minority would tell the majority how to live," said Michaels, who said he agrees with polls showing the majority of Americans don't believe in global warming, particularly doomsday global warming.

Michaels said environmentalists have been predicting disaster for years in one form or another, including the fear of overpopulation that was popular in the 1960s.

"There's always something out there," Michaels said. "People get tired of being beaten by those somethings."

Moreover, Michaels asserts that science doesn't confirm, and in some cases even rejects, the existence of human-caused global warming.

Seeing the light -- France

French government backs down on carbon tax plan
The French government has signalled that it is dropping a plan for a tax on domestic carbon dioxide emissions.

Jean-Francois Cope, parliamentary leader of the governing UMP party, was quoted as saying the tax "would be Europe-wide or not (exist) at all".

Prime Minister Francois Fillon told parliament that the government should focus on policies that increased France's economic competitiveness.

Well crap - 2010 Hurricane Predictions

PROBABILITIES FOR AT LEAST ONE MAJOR (CATEGORY 3-4-5) HURRICANE LANDFALL ON EACH OF THE FOLLOWING COASTAL AREAS*:

1) Entire U.S. coastline - 64% (average for last century is 52%)

2) U.S. East Coast Including Peninsula Florida - 40% (average for last century is 31%)

3) Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville - 40% (average for last century is 30%)

PROBABILITY FOR AT LEAST ONE MAJOR (CATEGORY 3-4-5) HURRICANE TRACKING INTO THE CARIBBEAN (10-20°N, 60-88°W)

1) 53% (average for last century is 42%)

2010 Hurricane Season Will Be More Active, Joe Bastardi Predicts
AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center meteorologists, led by Chief Long-Range Meteorologist and Hurricane Forecaster Joe Bastardi, have released their early hurricane season forecast for the Atlantic Basin for 2010.

The forecast is calling for a much more active 2010 season with above-normal threats on the U.S. coastline.

"This year has the chance to be an extreme season," said Bastardi. "It is certainly much more like 2008 than 2009 as far as the overall threat to the United States' East and Gulf coasts."

Bastardi is forecasting seven landfalls. Five will be hurricanes, and two or three of the hurricanes will be major landfalls for the U.S.

He is calling for 16 to 18 tropical storms in total, 15 of which would be in the western Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico, and therefore a threat to land.

In a typical season, there are about 11 named storms, of which two to three impact the coast of the United States.

Global Warming - Spain and France

Barcelona hit with heaviest snowfall in 25 years
Snowfalls of up to 50 centimetres (20 inches) were forecast for the worst affected areas of the region of Catalonia, prompting the regional government to cancel classes for more than 142,000 students at 476 public schools.

Power was lost in homes throughout the region, with energy company Fecsa-Endesa reporting 200,000 clients without electricity, mostly in the province of Girona.

Emergency services workers helped evacuate some 500 passengers who became trapped on trains traveling between Barcelona and Portbou, on the French border, which became stuck due to the lack of power, said regional interior minister Joan Boada.

Thousands of commuters were left scrambling for an alternative way to get home after the blizzard forced the suspension of bus services in Barcelona and the closure of five suburban train lines in the Mediterranean port city.

France and Spain shiver amid 'exceptional' unseasonable snow
Southern France and parts of Spain have been hit by unseasonable snow, with areas such as Collioure experiencing their heaviest fall in years.

Up to 40cm of snow fell overnight yesterday in France's central southern region, including Languedoc-Roussillon, Provence, the Rhône valley and Mid-Pyrénées. Such snowfall is "exceptional", according to the national weather bureau, Météo France.

Some 250 motorists in the Gard region were trapped in their cars on Sunday night after snow blocked the roads.

Local authorities towed the vehicles away and took their drivers to emergency shelters. Catalonia, meanwhile, also experienced heavy snow, disrupting travel across the region, including in Barcelona.

NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing
Last month we discussed how NASA continues to spread worries about the Antarctic warming and melting.

A January 12, 2010 Earth Observatory article warns that Antarctica:

“has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002” and that “if all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 60 meter (197 feet).“

[Note that is continental ice, not sea ice, - Anthony]

But NSIDC seems to be thinking differently in their March 3, 2010 newsletter. They say Antarctica is cooling and sea ice is increasing (makes sense – ice is associated with cold.)

Sea ice extent in the Antarctic has been unusually high in recent years, both in summer and winter. Overall, the Antarctic is showing small positive trends in total extent. For example, the trend in February extent is now +3.1% per decade. However, the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas show a strong negative trend in extent. These overall positive trends may seem counterintuitive in light of what is happening in the Arctic. Our Frequently Asked Questions section briefly explains the general differences between the two polar environments. A recent report (Turner, et. al., 2009) suggests that the ozone hole has resulted in changes in atmospheric circulation leading to cooling and increasing sea ice extents over much of the Antarctic region.

A chilling parallel

He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.

Lysenkoism and James Hansen
Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeler, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that "the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".

Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, should not be underestimated. In recognition of these events, the term Hansenism is now sometimes used to describe the climate hysteria which had, until recently, gripped western media sources and political, business and public opinion in a deadly grasp.

Histories of science contain an account of the ideological control of Soviet biology during the mid-20th century by plant scientist Trofim Lysenko, who by 1940 had risen to be Director of the influential Institute of Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Lysenko and his supporters rejected the "dangerous Western concepts" of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution. They preferred the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics; for instance, that cows could be trained to give more milk and their offspring would then inherit this trait.

Whilst this was not an unreasonable hypothesis to erect in the early 19th century, by the 1930s the idea had been tested in many ways and was known to be wrong. Requiring its application to agricultural and allied biological research in the USSR was disastrous, not least in the vicious persecution of scientists that took place, and the legacy of this sad episode still disadvantages Soviet biology today.

Lysenkoism grew from four main roots:

• a necessity to demonstrate the practical relevance of science to the needs of society;
• the amassing of evidence to show the "correctness" of the concept as a substitute for causal proof;
• noble cause corruption, whereby data are manipulated to support a cause which is seen as a higher truth; and
• ideological zeal, such that dissidents are silenced as "enemies of the truth".

The first of these roots has been strongly represented in Australian government attitudes to the funding of science as far back as the 1980s. The remaining three roots exemplify closely the techniques that are currently used by global warming alarmists in pursuit of their aims – as recently exposed for all to see by the Climategate and IPCCgate scandals.

Lysenkoism damaged mainly Soviet science and society, whereas Hansenism has now been exerting its pernicious influence worldwide for more than twenty years. The climate alarmism involved has long been undermining the precious public trust from which science draws its traditional influence and sustenance, and now Climategate has opened up new sinkholes all over the place.

Hansenist climate alarmism has also damaged the standing of many leading science journals and science organizations, which have replaced their formerly careful editorial and organizational balance with environmental alarmism and naked global warming advocacy.

Future historians of science are likely to judge the 1988-2009 frenzy of climate change alarmism as even more damaging than Lysenkoism, because of the distrust that collapse of the global warming paradigm has already inculcated about using science to inform modern policy making.

Instead of exercising the leadership that is desperately needed to correct this, and to restore public faith in science and scientists, public utterances from Australia’s senior research advisors show that they have so far lost the plot that they are no longer even in the theatre.

Bob Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia). He is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than thirty years professional experience, and holds degrees from the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the University of Cambridge (England). He has held tenured academic staff positions at the University of Otago (Dunedin) and James Cook University (Townsville), where he was Professor and Head of School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999.

Bob Carter's current research on climate change, sea-level change and stratigraphy is based on field studies of Cenozoic sediments (last 65 million years) from the Southwest Pacific region, especially the Great Barrier Reef and New Zealand, and includes the analysis of marine sediment cores collected during ODP Leg 181.

Bob Carter has acted as an expert witness on climate change before the U.S. Senate Committee of Environment & Public Works, the Australian and N.Z. parliamentary Select Committees into emissions trading and in a meeting in parliament house, Stockholm. He was also a primary science witness in the U.K. High Court case of Dimmock v. H.M.'s Secretary of State for Education, the 2007 judgement from which identified nine major scientific errors in Mr Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth".

The Climate Panic of the day - Methane

Methane, The Panic Du Jour

The climate panic headline this week has been that the warming Arctic is burping out dangerous quantities of greenhouse gas Methane.

Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by Agence France Presse

Huge Methane Leak in Arctic Ocean: Study

WASHINGTON – Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday. From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. “This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land,” the study said. “More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future.”

Methane is 30X more potent a greenhouse than CO2, so this sounds very alarming. Or does it? From the New York Times:

Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million.

The first problem with the statement is that it is incorrect. The average global methane concentration is ~1.8 ppm, (1786 ppb) not 0.6 ppm as seen below in this graph from NOAA.

The icecaps are melting

More than 50 ships stuck in Baltic Sea ice: maritime authorities
More than 50 ships, including large ferries reportedly carrying thousands of passengers, were stuck in ice in the Baltic Sea Thursday evening, and many were not likely to be freed for hours, Swedish maritime authorities said.

Good news from the United Nations for a change

Independent Board to Review Work of Top Climate Panel
An independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the world’s top climate science panel, which has faced recriminations over inaccuracies in a 2007 report, a United Nations environmental spokesman said Friday.

The board’s work will be part of a broader review of the body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, who spoke on the sidelines of an international meeting of environment ministers here.

Anthropogenic Global Warming - a Cult?

100 reasons why Anthropogenic Global Warming is a cult
Is belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming a cult? Apply this 100 point Cult Test and you tell us. Read each one, adding one point for each statement that rings as true. Total up the score and tell us, on a scale of 0 to 100, what you come up with. Well, it really should be a score between 1 to 100, as there can be no person alive, even if a member of the cult, that could not agree with point #1.

Cult leader Al Gore, is so “always right” that his devotees don’t even question the fact that he will debate no one. Ever. Anywhere. They laugh at this absurd notion, for He is The One. Others are unworthy to even stand in his presence.

In a comment here on our site, Gord alerted us to the test when he posted the first 10 points of “The Cult Test.”

It describes the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Change near perfectly. Following are the first ten points, with a bit of description from the extensively documented list.

1. The Guru is always right.
“The Guru, his church, and his teachings are always right, and above criticism, and beyond reproach.”

2. You are always wrong.
“Cult members are also told that they are in no way qualified to judge the Guru or his church. Should you disagree with the leader or his cult about anything, see Cult Rule Number One. Having negative emotions about the cult or its leader is a “defect” that needs to be fixed.”

3. No Exit.
“There is simply no proper or honorable way to leave the cult. Period. To leave is to fail, to die, to be defeated by evil. To leave is to invite divine retribution.”

4. No Graduates.
“No one ever learns as much as the Guru knows; no one ever rises to the level of the Guru’s wisdom, so no one ever finishes his or her training, and nobody ever graduates.”

5. Cult-speak.
“The cult has its own language. The cult invents new terminology or euphemisms for many things. The cult may also redefine many common words to mean something quite different. Cult-speak is also called “bombastic redefinition of the familiar”, or “loading the language”.”

Practice what you preach - Rajenda Pachauri

Pachauri’s TERI institute golf course – water hog in a city desperate for fresh water
Richard North of the EU Referendum reports on this bizarre twist with IPCC Chairman Rajenda Pachauri’s use of land that was designated for public use, now runs afoul of the grant terms under which the land was given. Plus a lot of water in a city that has water shortages. So much for sustainability.

Pachauri, famous for telling other how to live sustainable lives has a private chauffeur, spurns his electric cars provided for him, and once said in a newspaper interview:

‘Unfortunately, “social and environmental issues are often left without effective support when economic growth takes precedence,” he added.’

So, that’s why you charge memberships to your golf course and keep out the public from land given to you designated for public use?

It’s time for Pachauri to go. He’s dirty, deceitful, and dim witted. His personal life is hypocritical of what he preaches to the rest of the world via his IPCC position and is a public relations disaster.

A nice climate letter to the editor

The sound of alarm
Kerry Emanuel's Feb. 15 op-ed "Climate changes are proven fact" is more advocacy than assessment. Vague terms such as "consistent with," "probably," and "potentially" hardly change this. Certainly climate change is real; it occurs all the time. To claim that the little we’ve seen is larger than any change we "have been able to discern" for a thousand years is disingenuous. Panels of the National Academy of Sciences and Congress have concluded that the methods used to claim this cannot be used for more than 400 years, if at all. Even the head of the deservedly maligned Climatic Research Unit acknowledges that the medieval period may well have been warmer than the present.

The claim that everything other than models represents "mere opinion and speculation" is also peculiar. Despite their faults, models show that projections of significant warming depend critically on clouds and water vapor, and the physics of these processes can be observationally tested (the normal scientific approach); at this point, the models seem to be failing.

Finally, given a generation of environmental propaganda, a presidential science adviser (John Holdren) who has promoted alarm since the 1970s, and a government that proposes funding levels for climate research about 20 times the levels in 1991, courage seems hardly the appropriate description - at least for scientists supporting such alarm.

Climategate - Monckton takes a victory lap

Climategate: Viscount Monckton Takes a Victory Lap
For several months, the “Monthly CO2 Reports,” compiled by me at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org, have been pointing out that there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years. Regular attacks on my calculations and graphs have appeared on blogs by the usual suspects — Gavin Schmidt of NASA being, as usual, the most venomously ad hominem and the least scientifically plausible.

Then came Climategate. Kevin Trenberth, one of the many scientists whose activities I had been following with suspicion for some years, had privately been saying to his colleagues that there had been “no global warming for a decade” and that it was “a travesty” that they could not explain why. Publicly, of course, the Climategate conspirators had been saying that the last ten years were the warmest decade on the instrumental record — true, but not surprising given that there has been 300 years of global warming.

Now, Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia has admitted publicly, and — as far as I know — for the first time, that there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years. He has also admitted that his Climatic Research Unit has lost much of the data behind the “hockey-stick” graph, via which Michael Mann and other Climategate conspirators had falsely attempted to demonstrate that the Medieval Warm Period was not warmer than the present.

Jones has admitted that he is not very good at keeping data tidily. And that, in a scientist, is a startling omission. Seekers after truth in the natural world, from Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton, were famous for keeping notebooks. There they carefully recorded all of their observations. Newton, who went to the same grammar school as Margaret Thatcher (one of the few grammar schools not to have been abolished by politicians intent on destroying the last vestiges of sound education in Britain), had been taught to keep these notebooks from an early age.

Yet Phil Jones had not managed the most basic task of anyone compiling a temperature record. He had not kept, in good order, the data on which the record was based. Anyone who reads the “Harry Read-Me.txt” file — which contains 15,000 lines of commentary by a programmer about the numerous appalling defects in data handling and processing at the Climate Research Unit — cannot help but be struck by the sheer ineptitude of the whole proceeding.

In effect, the temperature record of the CRU is little better than a fabrication — much like the four assessment reports of the IPCC. Taxpayers should clamor for the abolition of the CRU and of the IPCC. Their findings are not just lies — they are expensive lies.

As the wheels come off the Anthropogenic Global Warming bandwagon

Why Does the MSM Ignore Al Gore’s ‘Global Warming’ Million$?
In yet another case of willful blindness, our formerly august mainstream media all but ignores Al Gore’s global warming millions. Their secular saint, Prophet Al, has become a very rich man off his global warming “science.” Yet, whenever he is interviewed by those virtuous paragons among the media elite, you’ll hear nary a peep on the fact that Prophet Al stands to become the “World’s First Carbon Billionaire,” if and when governments – especially ours – enact the cap and trade legislation, of which Mr. Gore is the most vociferous proponent.

The lying hypocrisy of it is just too much for an honest person to bear.

Mr. Gore has, in effect, declared economic war on the middle-class American family through his global warming faux science. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the cap and trade legislation, which passed the House last year, will cost the average American family $890 per year. But the conservative Heritage Foundation immediately challenged this figure. Using a more inclusive analysis, Heritage raised the estimate to at least $1,870 per year.

Al Gore, Call Your Agent: It Really May Be Time to Give Back That Oscar
Oops! The wheels may have just come off Al Gore’s Oscar-winning, eco-friendly tricycle/global-warming scam. From the U.K. Times on Line today (Sunday):

World may not be warming, say scientists
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

Where's Al

Snow removal problems in D.C.

Too Dangerous to Plow, D.C., Area Governments Halt Snow Removal
Washington, D.C., and neighboring Montgomery County, Md., may have just lived up to its reputation as "wimpy" weather warriors -- suspending snow plow operations as a blizzard bears down on the region.

Or maybe not.

The National Weather Service on Wednesday used the phrases "extremely dangerous" and "life-threatening blizzard" to describe conditions in Baltimore and Washington, which have both set records this week for the snowiest seasons ever. Wind gusts have reached as high as 60 miles per hour as the blizzard passed through the region.

Fact Check: Eastern U.S. earthquake risk
A magnitude-3.8 earthquake struck northern Illinois early Wednesday, shaking homes and buildings and rattling plenty of nerves.

Doug Dupont of Belvidere, Illinois, about 70 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, said it shook him out of bed and left a crack in his kitchen wall.

"It was really scary. It felt like a train was going by our house," Dupont said. "This is not California. This is northern Illinois. We are not supposed to get earthquakes."

The CNN Fact Check Desk wondered: Are earthquakes east of the Rocky Mountains unlikely, or was Tuesday's predawn quake in Illinois a wake-up call for Easterners?

• The U.S. Geological Survey says earthquakes pose "a significant risk to 75 million Americans in 39 states."

• Of the 26 U.S. urban areas deemed at risk for significant seismic activity, nearly one-third are east of the Rockies, including New York; Boston, Massachusetts; St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee; and Charleston, South Carolina.

• One of the most active eastern quake zones is the New Madrid seismic zone, winding southward from Illinois and Missouri down through west Tennessee and Arkansas. It unleashed a series of magnitude-8.0 quakes in 1811-12.

Seismologists say we can expect one that big every 200 to 300 years. And quakes in the 6.0 range come every 80 years or so. The last one in the area was in 1895, 115 years ago.

Fact checking the IPCC

Pick a paragraph
This was a little experiment that turned up some interesting results. The idea was to pick a paragraph from the IPCC reports and look at its provenance, just to see if anything interesting turned up. It did.

Unfortunately it turned up so much, that I've decided only to analyse the first sentence of the paragraph. I've got a life you know.

Here's the paragraph. It's from WG2, Chapter 10, and its the start of section 10.2.4.1 which is about the effects of climate change on food production.

10.2.4.1 Agriculture and food production
Production of rice, maize and wheat in the past few decades has declined in many parts of Asia due to increasing water stress arising partly from increasing temperature, increasing frequency of El Niño and reduction in the number of rainy days (Wijeratne, 1996;Aggarwal et al., 2000; Jin et al., 2001; Fischer et al., 2002; Tao et al., 2003a; Tao et al., 2004). In a study at the International Rice Research Institute, the yield of rice was observed to decrease by 10% for every 1°C increase in growing-season minimum temperature (Peng et al., 2004). A decline in potentially good agricultural land in East Asia and substantial increases in suitable areas and production potentials in currently cultivated land in Central Asia have also been reported (Fischer et al., 2002). Climate change could make it more difficult than it is already to step up the agricultural production to meet the growing demands in Russia (Izrael and Sirotenko, 2003) and other developing countries in Asia.

First step was to look at the citations. I've linked PDFs where I have them.

■Surprisingly for a sentence about rice, maize and wheat Wijeratne 1996 turns out to be about tea production in Sri Lanka.
■I haven't been able to lay my hands on Aggarwal or Jin (I think Aggarwal should actually be Agarwal).
■Fischer et al is a study published by an NGO, the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). This body seems to do research into environmental issues. THe study in question appears to be a special report paid for by the UN and as far as I can tell, non-peer reviewed.
■Tao 2003a I can't find
■Tao 2004 is a paper on variability in Chinese climate and how various oscillations (ENSO< EASM) affect crops.

So by the end of the first sentence, none of the cited papers that I can lay my hands on support the text as written, namely that "Production of rice, maize and wheat in the past few decades has declined in many parts of Asia".

Some of the reasons for this change became clear when I looked at the Second Order Draft. Here's the equivalent paragraph.

Fun times in Washington DC - more snow

25 percent of D.C. plows out of commission
As the region braces for another major storm, one local government is having trouble keeping their plows on the roads, WTOP has learned.

As many as 60 of the District's snow plows are not working -- bad news for thousands of residents still waiting for their streets to be cleared.

According to an internal email obtained by WTOP, 25 percent of the District's snow plow fleet is down and they're having trouble getting replacement parts.

D.C. is also now rationing their salt supply.

The email states they'll have enough to get through the upcoming storm. DDOT has 9,000 tons of salt on hand, with another 32,000 tons coming in soon. The city normally has 40-50,000 tons of salt onhand.

The email also raises concerns about staffing issues. Crews have been working non-stop since the blizzard on Friday.

Plows will continue to salt streets to prevent re-freezing overnight.

Blogging the Snowpocalypse
You will probably have noticed that I did not post this morning. That's because sometime before 8 am, I decided that I should get to the grocery store and pick up my lung medicine in the hiatus between snows.

Four hours later, I returned with a trunk full of whatever could be scavenged from the grocery store shelves. You have never seen a city as completely incompetent at dealing with snow as Washington DC.

I mean, two feet of snow is inconvenient anywhere. But in DC, only the main streets have been plowed. And by "plowed", I mean that one meager lane has been cleared, so that even major arteries like New York Avenue frequently narrow to one lane. The side streets have been turned into defacto one-way streets--except that no one knows which way. The result is a lot like driving on a country road in Ireland, where you are apt to come upon someone going the other way, and then spend precious moments staring at each other until one party reluctantly backs up to a wider spot.

The difference is that Irish drivers are somewhat familiar with the conditions. DC today is the province of taxi drivers and SUV owners who seem simultaneously confused and overconfident. As I eased down the street in our little Japanese sedan, I quickly surmised that none of the drivers in the bite-sized tanks surrounding me had ever seen snow before. Three blocks later I revised that opinion: I don't think any of them had ever seen cars before. Certainly not the ones they were operating.

Apparently, if you buy an SUV in the Greater Washington DC area, this gives you license to drive much faster than the rest of traffic on a road that only has one open lane. Unfortunately, it does not give you any basic information about the function of four wheel drive--such as the fact that while 4WD does allow you to accelerate better in snowy conditions, it does not improve your braking ability. Nor, as one of my twitter mates pointed out, does it enhance your turning power. And of course, four wheel drive will not stop you from fishtailing on the slick layer of slush covering a solid base of hard-packed snow. I witnessed one minor fender bender and three near accidents in the perhaps three miles that I covered this morning.

Talking about the weather

The upcoming East Coast snowstorm

U.S. Mid-Atlantic Cleans Up From Snow; More Coming
Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia began digging out today from a blizzard that dumped as much as three feet of snow on parts of the mid-Atlantic region and left thousands without power.

Elkridge, Maryland, just south of Baltimore, recorded the region’s most snowfall with 38.3 inches (97 centimeters), the National Weather Service said. Baltimore’s airport had 24.8 inches, while Washington’s Reagan National had 17.8 inches, its second-biggest snowfall total. Philadelphia registered 28.5 inches, its second-biggest snowfall also. In the Virginia town of Howellsville, west of Washington, 37 inches fell.

“This was an epic storm,” said Andrew Ulrich, a meteorologist for AccuWeather.com Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania. “The sheer amount of snow was amazing.”

And there is more in store.

AccuWeather said another storm will arrive in the Northeast during the night of Feb. 9 into the morning of Feb. 10. Possible blizzard conditions are forecast for northeastern Pennsylvania to New England and as much as 12 inches of snow may fall. Baltimore and Washington may see as much as six inches of new snow, Ulrich said.

Another Major Cross-Country Snowstorm Taking Shape
A storm moving into the southern Plains tonight will turn into the next major cross-country snowstorm over the next few days. Substantial snow will develop across the Plains through Monday and spread into the Northeast and mid-Atlantic Tuesday into Wednesday. The storm is expected to strengthen as it reaches the mid-Atlantic coast, bringing more substantial snow to areas pummeled by the powerhouse storm this weekend and to areas farther north that were missed. Major disruptions to travel will result with delays and cancellations of flights, school and other activities.

A little more climate change would be a great help

Olympic Organisers desperate for climate change
Winter Olympics chiefs will not sanction a desperate last-minute venue switch despite unseasonably warm temperatures continuing to curse Cypress Mountain, the host of the freestyle events at the Games which begin on Friday.

The host city enjoyed highs of 11 degrees again on Saturday while meteorological officials said that the warm weather, which has led to 300 dumper trucks and even helicopters being used to transport snow from higher elevations, will continue right up to the opening ceremony on February 12.

The imported snow has been piled high on wood and hay which have been laid to form the bumps which test the freestyle skiiers at Cypress Mountain.

"We are not relocating any events," said Tim Gayda, the vice-president of organising committee VANOC, responding to the problems caused by the warmest January on record, a legacy of El Nino, a periodic warming feature over the Pacific Ocean.

"We had a bunch of contingency plans about too much snow or too little snow and we are largely knee-deep in the contingency plan for the too-little snow.

The great seer - Robert F. Kennedy

Palin's Big Oil infatuation
Los Angeles Times
September 24, 2008
By ROBERT F. KENNEDY Jr.

I was water-skiing with my children in a light drizzle off Hyannis, Mass., last month when a sudden, fierce storm plunged us into a melee of towering waves, raking rain, painful hail and midday darkness broken by blinding flashes of lightning. As I hurried to get my children out of the water and back to the dock, I shouted over the roaring wind, "This is some kind of tornado."

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today's anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don't own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington's C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy. In 1998, these companies plotted to deceive American citizens about climate science. Their goal, according to a meeting memo, was to orchestrate information so that "recognition of uncertainties become part of the conventional wisdom" and that "those promoting the Kyoto treaty ... appear to be out of touch with reality."

Corporate America's media toadies continue to amplify Exxon's deceptive message. The company can count on its hand puppets -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, John Stossel and Glenn Beck -- to shamelessly mouth skepticism about man-made climate change and give political cover to the oil industry's indentured servants on Capitol Hill. Oklahoma's Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public."

More on the East Coast snowstorm

The big snowfall of 2010 - Washington DC

Highlights of Lord Monckton's speech in Australia

Tick tock tick tock tick tock

Pachauri has highest level support from government: Ramesh
Days after turning the heat on the IPCC chief over the Himalayan glaciers melting issue, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Thursday said the government supports R K Pachauri as the UN climate change panel's head at the highest level.

"The government backs Pachauri as the chief of the Intergovernmental Penal on Climate Change (IPCC) at the highest level. Past is past," Ramesh said referring to his recent criticism of the UN body chief on the goof up that glaciers will melt by 2035, a claim later found to be false.

His support to Pachauri comes a day before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurates a global event here organised by The Energy and Resources Institutes (TERI), which is headed by the IPCC chief.

"The government supports him (Pachauri) to the hilt," maintained Ramesh, who had slammed the processes of the UN body over the glaciers melting issue, saying "due diligence was not followed".

Ramesh's comments backing Pachauri comes a few hours after head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat Yvo de Boer supported the IPCC chief, saying that holding him responsible for the goof up in the report on Himalayan glaciers would be "senseless".

Talking to reporters here, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said, "he (Pachauri) is a very respected international scientist and is leading the IPCC in a very dedicated way."

India does the right thing regarding the climate

India forms new climate change body
The Indian government's move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing in the face of global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses … they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

Pachauri the Luuuuv Guru - jumps the shark

UK Greenpeace director calls for new IPCC chairman – meanwhile Pachy comments on the use of makeup
In an interview with the Times, John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK suggests that the IPCC needs a new chairman other than The Love Guru. But, in a recent press release, it looks like the IPCC is digging in their collective Nobel Laureate heels. Meanwhile, news of newspaper clippings in IPCC AR4 peer reviewed research.

With quotes like these coming from Pachy, he’s quickly running out of supporters who have been looking past his blown credibility. Here’s a quote from the Love Guru himself in a Financial Times interview today:

They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder – and I hope they put it on their faces every day…

Six more months weeks

Still better than the Met Office

Punxsutawney Phil is held by Ben Hughes after emerging this morning from his burrow on Gobblers Knob in Punxsutawney. Phil saw his shadow and forecast six more weeks of winter weather.

Don’t put those cold weather clothes in storage just yet.

Punxsutawney Phil, the internationally known weather prognosticating groundhog, saw his shadow this morning and predicted six more weeks of winter.

Thousands gathered on Gobbler’s Knob in Jefferson County to await the groundhog’s annual prediction. The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club said Phil has seen his shadow 98 times since 1887, hasn’t seen it 15 times, and there are no records for nine years.

Lord Monckton on Rajenda Pachauri

Completely off the wall - stone cold bonkers

IPCC now in Bizzaroland: Pachauri releases “smutty” romance novel
Just when you think things can’t get any more bizarre with the IPCC, having just learned that the IPPC 2007 report used magazine articles for references, head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, provides comedy gold. According to the UK Telegraph, he’s just released what they describe as a “smutty” romance novel, Return to Almora laced with steamy sex, lots of sex. Oh, and Shirley MacLaine.

By page 16, Sanjay is ready for his first liaison with May in a hotel room in Nainital. “She then led him into the bedroom,” writes Dr Pachauri.

“She removed her gown, slipped off her nightie and slid under the quilt on his bed… Sanjay put his arms around her and kissed her, first with quick caresses and then the kisses becoming longer and more passionate.

“May slipped his clothes off one by one, removing her lips from his for no more than a second or two.

“Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sandy, I’ve learned something for the first time today. You are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’.”

The wheels are coming off

Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change
The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.

John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding.

China has 'open mind' about cause of climate change
China's most senior climate change official surprised a summit in India when he questioned whether global warming is caused by carbon gas emissions and said Beijing is keeping an "open mind".

The billion-dollar hoax
Once global warming was the "great moral challenge of our generation". Or so claimed the Prime Minister.

But suddenly it's the great con that's falling to bits around Kevin Rudd's ears.

In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his "moral challenge" at all.

Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools - but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes.

What's happened?

Canadian scientist says UN's global warming panel 'crossing the line'
A senior Canadian climate scientist says the United Nations' panel on global warming has become tainted by political advocacy, that its chairman should resign, and that its approach to science should be overhauled.

Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

"There's been some dangerous crossing of that line," said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.

Heat wave closes in on the IPCC
A catastrophic heat wave appears to be closing in on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How hot is it getting in the scientific kitchen where they’ve been cooking the books and spicing up the stew pots? So hot, apparently, that Andrew Weaver, probably Canada’s leading climate scientist, is calling for replacement of IPCC leadership and institutional reform.

If Andrew Weaver is heading for the exits, it’s a pretty sure sign that the United Nations agency is under monumental stress. Mr. Weaver, after all, has been a major IPCC science insider for years. He is Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, mastermind of one of the most sophisticated climate modelling systems on the planet, and lead author on two recent landmark IPCC reports. For him to say, as he told Canwest News yesterday, that there has been some “dangereous crossing” of the line between climate advocacy and science at the IPCC is stunning in itself.

Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say
Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

China experiences bitter cold

Ice in Chinese ports “exceeding anything experienced in 30 years”
From Maritime Global.net

CHINA PORTS FREAK WEATHER ALERT

By David Hughes
Published: Tue, 26 January 2010

Freak weather conditions and/or abnormal weather patterns have been reported in several parts of the world during recent months warns the American P&I Club. One of the latest examples is a significant build-up of sea ice in some major northern Chinese ports, the volume exceeding, it says, anything experienced in more than 30 years.

In an alert to its members, the club says the problem is centred around Bohai on the northern Yellow Sea coast, affecting ports such as Bayuquan and Dalian. At Bayuquan, patches of ice 500-600mm thick have formed in some places, while lesser patches have been seen in the immediate vicinity of the port.

Three icebreakers are working to avoid delays to ships, while the local Maritime Safety Authority is strictly supervising inbound and outbound vessel traffic.

In Alaska of all places

Denial more dangerous than abortion
A recent attempt to show the Gore antidote, Not Evil Just Wrong in Colony High School in Wasilla, home town of Sarah Palin, met with some unexpected opposition.

Although al-Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had been shown many times, the school authorities insisted that any student who wanted to see the antidote had to have a permission slip from their parents.

To put this in perspective, not only was no such condition in place before screening An Inconvenient Truth, in Alaska, the State can arrange an abortion for a student without notifying their parents.

Nice to see that the authorities have their priorities right.

More storms lined up for California

New Pacific Storm to Endanger Los Angeles, Phoenix Communities
A new Pacific storm will unleash the worst of its fury across Southern California and Arizona today into tonight. It is inevitable that more flooding, mudslides, wind damage and burying mountain snow will result, potentially leading to deadly and destructive consequences. Heavy rain from previous storms this week has heighten the threat of flooding and mudslides, even outside of the recently burned areas. Severe thunderstorms could also add to the storm's danger.

A curious turn of events

Sweet Schadenfreude

BBC forecast for Met Office: changeable
Buffeted by complaints about its inaccurate weather forecasts, the Met Office now faces being dumped by the BBC after almost 90 years.

The Met Office contract with the BBC expires in April and the broadcaster has begun talks with Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, as a possible alternative.

The BBC put the contract out to tender to ensure “best value for money”, but its timing coincides with a storm over the Met Office’s accuracy.

Last July the state-owned forecaster’s predictions for a “barbecue summer” turned into a washout. And its forecast for a mild winter attracted derision when temperatures recently plunged as low as -22C.

Last week the Met Office failed to predict heavy snowfall in the southeast that brought traffic to a standstill. This weekend a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times reveals that 74% of people believe its forecasts are generally inaccurate.

By contrast, many commercial rivals got their predictions for winter right. They benefit from weather forecasts produced by a panel of six different data providers, including the Met Office.

California to get some interesting weather in the coming weeks

‘Potentially epic’ rain coming to O.C.
The National Weather Service has issued a new and disturbing forecast for next week’s series of storms, saying Orange County could receive “potentially epic” rains, with as much as 20” of precipitation in the Santa Ana Mountains and 4” to 8” along the coast.

Santa Ana averages less than 3” of rain for the entire month of January.

“We’re giving a lot of advance warning so property owners and emergency planners can take action ahead of this,” says Rob Balfour, a weather service forecaster.

The U.S. Climate Prediction Center said today the upcoming storms “finally show El Nino traipsing in” to Southern California. El Nino can greatly enhance rainfall. Forecasters said the upcoming storms could rival the damaging El Nino rains that hit Orange County in January 1995.

Balfour said the polar jet stream “is extremely strong; it already extends from off Asia to Hawaii and up higher.” The storms will tap some of that sub-tropical moisture, strengthening the storms.

The first storm will arrive late Sunday night or early Monday and will drop 1.5” or more of rain. The surges coming Tuesday and Thursday/Friday will be stronger. By the end of the week, hillsides will be soaked, raising the prospect of mudslides. Ski resorts in the San Bernardino Mountains are expected to get 4 feet of snow.

Finally - New Scientist comes clean about Global Warming

Vladimir Putin gets it - will other world leaders follow?

Putin urges prompt elimination of energy failures
Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has urged power engineering specialists to fix energy failures without delays, Itar-Tass quotes him saying during a meeting with the regional development minister, Viktor Basargin, on Monday.

Putin said the country had entered the heating season on time, and “the national energy suppliers have been working practically without failures.”

However, he said, there are certain problems, and they need to be solved without any delay. Those affected do not care about statistics, he remarked.

The country, said Putin, had entered the season in a tougher environment than it was expected.

“In addition to the global warming challenges, we need to address 'global cooling' effects and to do so promptly,” he said.

Florida in for a hard freeze

Freeze in Florida Tonight Will Be Worst Since 1989
Several blasts of arctic air have gripped the eastern two-thirds of the country since the beginning of the new year. In the South, the extreme cold has been threatening crops, and temperatures tonight could be the most damaging for some.

While temperatures will rebound throughout the upcoming week, a late-week rain storm could cause even more damage to Southern crops.

Tonight Will Be Most Damaging in Florida
So far, citrus-growers in Florida have gotten by with only light damage following several nights of sub-freezing temperatures over the past week. Tonight will likely prove more destructive as temperatures drop to the lowest levels in over 20 years.

According to AccuWeather.com Agricultural Meteorologist Dale Mohler, the hard freeze tonight will be the worst since December of 1989.

Mohler said that unlike the last few nights, temperatures tonight across all the orange groves will drop below freezing and most will dip blow 28°, a critical temperature for the fruit. In many groves, temperatures will stay below 28° for 6 to 10 hours or more.

Mohler expects a 6 to 10 percent loss of the total 2009 orange crop after tonight's freeze. The groves where temperatures drop between 23 and 25 degrees will suffer the most significant damage.

Weather v/s Climate

SNOW CHAOS: AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT'S GLOBAL WARMING
AS one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.

With millions of Britons battling through snow and ice to get to work today, scientists claim that the cold conditions should not be used as evidence against man-made climate change.

Blizzards, ice and sub-zero temperatures that have gripped the UK for almost a month in a record deep freeze are not “robust” indicators of global weather patterns, they say.

Their claims come despite the fact that the rest of the northern hemisphere, from America to Europe and Asia, is suffering some of the worst winters in living memory.

Huge snowfalls are being witnessed from China and South Korea, across eastern, central and western Europe and to America where even Florida is struggling to record temperatures above freezing.

Last night critics of the global warming lobby said the public were no longer prepared to be conned into believing that man-made emissions were adding to the problem.

Long-term forecaster and trends analyst Piers Corbyn, of WeatherAction, said: “Global warming is a failed science built on falsified data. It is a sham to say that man has caused it.”

But Stephen Dorling, of the scandal-hit University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences, remained adamant that the weather should not be used as evidence against climate change.

But he added: “It’s no surprise that people look out of their window and find it hard to rationalise what’s going on with the longer term trend.”

The winter of our discontent...

Energy security questioned as National Grid cuts off gas to factories
Exclusive: Severe weather and creaking power infrastructure lead to first tangible sign that fears over energy shortages are translating into supply disruption

Vauxhall's car plant at Ellesmere Port and British Sugar's refineries at Bury St Edmunds and Newark are among nearly 100 factories that have had their energy supplies cut as Britain threatens to lurch from whiteout to blackout.

The National Grid has told British Gas and other power suppliers to cut or reduce their power to major corporate customers in a bid to preserve gas for domestic households as extreme weather caused a surge in demand.

Opposition MPs said inadequate energy planning by the government in previous years had left the country heading towards an "energy crisis" that could only dent the UK's fragile economic recovery.

IPCC - follow the money

Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

Rather preoccupied
Bound by a vow of silence which might have something to do with this and this (see pic above, plus pages 55 and 107), a certain newspaper article and a blog called EU Referendum.

Plus I have had a newspaper piece to write ... which with luck you will see on Sunday – so I hastily bid you all a Happy New Year and hope I'm still around to enjoy blogging it. TERI-Europe part 2 will be posted later today.

Leaning on North
It looks as though Pachauri may be getting nasty over North and Booker's revelations of his conflicting interests in the Telegraph. There is a very mysterious posting up at his blog now.

Spread the word.

Update:

North in the comments to his posting gives some clues to the contents of the lawyer's letter he has received:

An entertaining, four-page missive. The last paragraph reads: "Please do not mistake our client's resolve to take whatever action is necessary to protect their reputations. If we do not hear from you in the timeframe indicated, proceedings will be issued."

Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words.

A potential nail in the coffin

Major northern hemisphere cold snap coming
Cold event setups in atmospheric circulation patterns are aligning. Two days ago I brought to your attention that there was a strong downspike in the Arctic Oscillation Index and that the North Atlantic Oscillation Index was also negative. See The Arctic Oscillation Index goes strongly negative.

Yesterday, Senior AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi let loose with this stunning prediction on the AccuWeather premium web site via Brett Anderson’s Global warming blog:

What is facing the major population centers of the northern hemisphere is unlike anything that we have seen since the global warming debate got to the absurd level it is now, which essentially has been there is no doubt about all this. For cold of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy consuming areas of the northern Hemisphere. The first 15 days of the opening of the New Year will be the coldest, population weighted, north of 30 north world wide in over 25 years in my opinion.

The Climate Prediction Center discussion for their forecast also concurs with both of the above:

THE AO INDEX WHICH RECENTLY HAS BEEN VERY STRONGLY NEGATIVE IS FORECAST TO INCREASE SLIGHTLY IN VALUE BUT REMAIN STRONGLY NEGATIVE THROUGH DAY 14. TODAYS BLEND CHART INDICATES BELOW NORMAL HEIGHTS ACROSS ROUGHLY THE SOUTHEASTERN TWO-THIRDS OF THE CONUS, AND ABOVE NORMAL HEIGHTS OVER THE NORTHWESTERN THIRD OF THE CONUS, CONSISTENT WITH A STRONGLY NEGATIVE AO.

The State of Our Climate is Settled

The Snow

High winds whip snow off the western peaks of
Mount Hood, Sunday, Dec. 13, 2009, as seen from
Government Camp, Oregon, where rescuers were waiting to begin
their search for two missing climbers.
The rescue mission was later suspended,
the climbers assumed to have died on the mountain.
(AP Photo/Don Ryan)

A look at what climate can do - cold kills

European weather deaths pass 100
More than 100 people have been killed in the cold snap across Europe, with temperatures plummeting and snowfall causing chaos from Moscow to Milan.

In Poland, where temperatures have dropped to as low as -20C in some areas, police appealed for tip-offs about people spotted lying around outside. At least 42 people, most of them homeless, died over the weekend.

In Ukraine 27 people have frozen to death since the thermometer dropped last week. Authorities in Romania said 11 people had succumbed to the chill, and in the Czech Republic the toll was 12. In Germany, where temperatures have fallen to -33C in certain parts, at least seven people are known to have lost their lives in the freezing weather.

O.M.G. - we need to DO SOMETHING!!!

Anthropogenic Continental Drift: An Incoherent Truth

Industrial Nations Threaten Globe Again
A new menace to the planet has been discovered and validated by a consensus of politically reliable scientists: Anthropogenic Continental Drift (ACD) will result in catastrophic damage and untold suffering, unless immediate indemnity payments from the United Sates, Europe, and Australia be made to the governments of non-industrial nations, to counteract this man-made threat to the world's habitats.

Science in Unquestionable
The continents rest on massive tectonic plates. Until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th century, these plates were fixed in place and immobile. However, drilling for oil and mining for minerals has cut these plates loose from their primordial moorings and left them to drift aimlessly. "The potential for damage is truly catastrophic," said Hans Brinker, a spokesman for the International Panel on Continental Drift (IPCD). "The continents are adrift due to the ruthless capitalist exploitation of the environment for profit. Unless immediate steps are taken to halt all oil and mineral extraction, we can expect a massive surge in earthquakes and volcanos by next Tuesday." The representative seemed close to tears during his announcement, a clear indicator of the severity of the threat.

Villages in Peril
The IPCD bureaucracy has gone even further, proposing immediate indemnity payments from the United Sates and Europe be paid to the governments of non-industrial nations. "These non-industrial nations will be hardest hit by the looming catastrophe. No right-thinking scientist can question that," pronounced Brinker after composing himself. "On one coast they will see increased surf levels on their beaches as their continents accelerate, while on the opposite coast the flow turbulence will wipe out entire ecologically appropriate semi-neolithic fishing villages." These villages, it must be pointed out, are the primary raisers of children. Only massive infusions of industrial-nation cash can avert these effects.

On the right path - Vaclav Klaus

Czech president smelled warming rat
Among the most reviled men in Europe today is Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic.

Klaus alone among most of the leaders in the European Union has been attempting to stem the growing tide of the new communism known as environmentalism, or, in its latest incarnation, "climate change."

"It is evident that the environmentalists don't want to change the climate,"Klaus warned at a conference in March. "They want to change our behavior ... to control and manipulate us."

The advocates of man-made global warming were quick to excoriate Klaus, pointing to the preponderance of "scientific data" supporting their cause.

As it turns out, Klaus was incredibly prescient. The so-called "scientific data" upon which the man-made global warmists were basing their case for shutting down the world's most productive economies turned out to be a hoax.

The release of e-mails and other documents from the mecca of the global warmists, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealed the deliberate destruction of records, the deliberate manipulation of data to hide any evidence contrary to the unit's working hypothesis, and the deliberate effort to malign opponents of man-made global warming while silencing them by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

Despite the best efforts of the global warmists to deny the damning evidence - including further prevarications by the high priest of the Church of Global Warming, Al Gore, who claimed the most recent e-mails in the information released were 10 years old when they were, in fact, just a month old - "Climategate" has simply helped to reveal the real purpose behind the global-warming alarmists: the destruction of free societies.

That much has become evident in the implosion of the U.N.'s Copenhagen climate conference. The very arrival of the conference delegates revealed precisely how much "climate" was a real concern. To get to Copenhagen, the delegates wound up using 140 private jets, and for transportation around the city, delegates engaged about 1,200 limousines. Comfort, for the elite, obviously trumps any "carbon footprint" that might be left on the environment.

Beyond the elitism - an all-too-common trait among those who would dictate to others - the real purpose of Copenhagen was further brought to light when the so-called "Danish Text" was leaked. The text basically wound up punishing developing countries, which, in turn, led to a walk-out by African delegates, followed by the appropriate apologies and the return of the boycotting delegates.

The bottom line, however, has been that every initiative pushed by the conference is designed simply as a transfer of wealth from industrialized nations to other countries, a wealth transfer that will simply empower third world dictators like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe while destroying the societies that have embraced freedom.

Vaclav Klaus was born in 1941 and spent most of his life living under communism. That back ground gave him a perspective on political reality that has largely been only an academic exercise for those who lived in the freedom afforded them by the West. His understanding of the insidious encroachment of communism, in any incarnation, is founded on experience. His analysis, that the ultimate goal of environmentalists is the complete control of society, continues to be supported by the actions of the global warmists.

Alexander Hamilton once observed, "No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave," yet the constant drumbeat of the leftists who are chanting the false mantra of global warming is that they know best, and that slavery to their dictates is to be much preferred over freedom. For those who are unwilling to believe the growing body of evidence that global warming is a hoax, Mark Twain said it best.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

The End Times are Nigh

President Obama, Congress should set health-care reform aside
The health-care dance in Washington, D.C., has gone on long enough. Congress needs to focus on the economy and set health care aside.

This is a change of position for us. This page supported Barack Obama for president, enthusiastically. We have supported the health-care effort until now. We still support universal coverage as a social goal.

But the longer the fight goes on, the more it feels that the timing is all wrong. The economy is wounded. Employers are hurting. The time to think about loading employers with new burdens is when they are strong. Not now.

Right now, Congress needs to focus on the economy. It needs to follow the lead of Sen. Maria Cantwell and re-enact Glass-Steagall, the law that separated investment banking from commercial banking and for 50 years helped maintain sanity on Wall Street. It needs to bolster the antitrust laws. It needs to lower the estate tax.

It needs to target the rest of the stimulus money at things that really stimulate — all of these actions to provide breathing room to small- and middle-sized family businesses that were once the backbone of the economy and can be again.

It needs to rejuvenate a trade agenda, starting by ratifying the agreement with Korea.

What he said...

Finally, the great climate change lie begins to unravel
Accord? Accordion, more like – a concertinaed agreement with carbon emissions restrictions unspecified, no legal sanctions and no international consensus. Altogether, a very satisfactory fiasco. But what better venue to devise a climate Danegeld than Copenhagen? Western taxpayers are to be mugged for $30bn over three years, then for $100bn in 2020 (we shall see about that).

Hans Christian Andersen was outclassed in his home town last week, in the fabrication of fairy tales. The Brothers Grim – Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri – are possessed of imaginations so rich as to dwarf the inventive powers of conventional story tellers. "Once upon a time," Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman Pachauri opened the proceedings by recycling all the much-loved, if long discredited, bedtime favourites.

Up it came, like the words of Widow Twanky's song at the climax of the pantomime – the notorious CRU East Anglia graph, the tortuous fabrication of which is now familiar worldwide, thanks to leaked e-mails and computer codes. There is not another room in the world where that tired imposture would not have provoked belly laughs; but neither is there one where Robert Mugabe would have received an ovation or "Two-Jags" Prescott been hailed as a crusader against carbon emissions.

Pachauri described his personal experience of sea-level rise in Bangladesh, which is curious since sea level in Bangladesh has fallen slightly, so that an extra 70,000 sq km of land surface is now exposed compared with 1980, as world expert Dr Nils-Axel Morner has described. When global warming zealots seek to discredit any sceptical commentator, they invariably sneer: "But he's not a scientist." Apparently the post of IPCC chairman is exempt from that stricture: Rajendra Pachauri is a railway engineer. The world's boiler is being damped down by the Fat Controller.

Carbon trading – Cecil Rhodes would have loved it. Rheumy-eyed retired sjambok-wielders thought the days when members of the pallid-skinned races could support a luxurious lifestyle by working Africans to death were gone for good. They reckoned without the invention of the carbon market, today's smarter, more profitable version of the slave trade. Al Gore could tell you that what Copenhagen was all about was increasing the price of carbon from $12 to $50 a tonne.

Rodger Phil and Me

Censorship - climate and skepticism redux

Censorship - climate and skepticism

In which I go beyond the pale
The Yale Climate Forum has a post up about Climategate - standard "move along now nothing to see here" fare. Perhaps attracted by the Yale name, I decided to make a small contribution to the debate there, picking up on some remarks by the piece's author Zeke Hausfather. Here's what he said about "hiding the decline":

This may be somewhat dubious in that it gives the impression that proxy reconstructions match the observed temperature record better than they otherwise would.

My comment was that "somewhat dubious" is a remarkable way to describe what Jones did. I pointed out that if he had done this as part of a share issue he would be looking at a long jail term. This is factually correct, and was posted pretty much in the terms I've given here.

Unfortunately though, The Yale Climate Forum viewed the posting of a true statement in mild terms as being completely beyond the pale and they decided to delete my comment.

I suppose the burning of heretics would be carbon neutral...

Copenhagen was a great big ______________

Climate 'deal' confusion
The United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen ended in apparent disarray last night with some world leaders hailing a "meaningful agreement", while others said no deal had been struck.

Obama: 'Meaningful breakthrough' on climate change
President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.

Obama's climate accord fails the test
World leaders late last night agreed a hugely watered-down version of a new global pact on climate change, after an astonishing day of deadlock, disagreement, misunderstandings, walkouts and insults at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen Chaos Could Imperil Senate Climate Bill
The chaotic conclusion of the two-week international conference on climate change could imperil, or at least water down, climate legislation stuck in the U.S. Senate.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., warned about that possibility two days ago when he first arrived in Copenhagen, saying that without a solid deal it would be "exceedingly difficult" to persuade fence-sitting lawmakers to get on board with the kind of emissions-curbing legislation that passed the House months ago.

Copenhagen didn't make that task any easier, observers said. The Obama administration announced a "meaningful agreement" late Friday following a marathon day of talks, but the deal is non-binding and far from the comprehensive agreement sought by Obama and other leaders. And with China resisting the kind of verification standards the United States was pushing for, concerns linger that China would not be making a shared sacrifice and that U.S. reductions would be meaningless without enforceable cuts from the developing world.

Who is involved in the IETA

• Bank of America Merrill Lynch
• Barclays Capital
• Deloitte & Touche
• Det Norske Veritas
• Deutsche Bank
• Doha Bank
• Ernst & Young Global Ltd.
• Fortis Bank
• JP Morgan Chase Bank
• KPMG
• Morgan Stanley & Co. International Limited
• PricewaterhouseCoopers

Turned over a rock and there was William Connolley

Wikipedia’s climate doctor
How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

Send in the clowns...

The Miming is Settled: It Is Time To Take Forceful Antics Against Climate Change
by Carbie the Climate Clown

Emmett K. Bozo Distinguished Professor of Climate Pantomimology, University of East Anglia
EU Regional President, Union of Concerned Climate Scientists and Street Performers

The scientific evidence is everywhere we look -- in our vanishing polar ice caps, in our melting greasepaint, in the way our lapel flowers struggle to squirt. Man-made climate change is upon us, and if we do not act at once Earth itself faces an immediate catastrophic ecological pie in the face.

As provost of the University of East Anglia's cutting edge Centre for Climate Pantomimology, I work closely with multidisciplinary climate scientists, both within the University and in the clown science community at large. There can be no disputing the peer reviewed models that show the Earth's temperature curving ever upwards, like the expanding tail of a tube balloon, propelled by mankind's relentless exhalation of carbon dioxide. If we are to avoid the coming explosion, we must tie off the end of the balloon as soon as possible. Then we must carefully shepherd and shape the balloon as nature intended, perhaps as one of nature's majestic balloon poodles.

To underscore the seriousness of this global threat, the UCCSSP convened an emergency academic symposium in Copenhagen this week to present our latest peer reviewed findings in support of the COP15 climate accords. Dr. Jingles Hansen of the US Goddard Institute for Space Science gave the plenary address, further documenting climate change by pulling a shocking unbroken string of temperature station windsocks from his sleeve. He was followed by Professor Pif-Pif of the Brussels Institute of Geophysical Mime Modeling, who demonstrated how rising temperatures will leave man in an invisible box, struggling in vain against growing surface convection winds.

In light of these findings, the UCCSSP delegates passed a multipoint draft resolution calling for immediate action on clown-driven climate justice and sustainability. Protocols include:

• By 2011, a mandatory 50% increase in minimum clown carpooling passenger loads.
• Immediate reductions in wasteful shoe sizes.
• Immediate replacement of carbonated seltzer water in all spritz bottles with recycled urine.
• By 2013, an 80% increase in target levels for clown child abductions and murder.
• A 300% increase in UN clown research funding, including first class upgrades on all junkets to international clown meetings.
• Violent lunatic street rioting.

These conclusions were not only endorsed by the scientific and clown communities, but by a broad cross-section of experts across scholarly disciplines. Among these included the Association of People Dressed Up Like Polar Bears, The Organization of Hysterically Weeping Science Journalists, the EU Centre for Scientific Self-Immolation, Monarchs and Despots United for Scientific Gaia Worship, Ed Begley Jr., and the prestigious International Society of Scientists With Intense Daddy Issues. All of whom, I might add, have a minimum of 15 years in graduate school.

Despite such an overwhelming scientific consensus, enacting climate change regulations has proven difficult. On one side you will find the rational voices of the peer reviewed experts: scientists, scholars, clowns, lachrymose journalists, beloved dictators, former sitcom stars, rioting people in polar bear costume who start themselves on fire. On the other side are the anti-science denialists, funded by a secret cabal of economic interests.

Unfortunately, some members of the public have been duped by so-called "skepticlowns" like Shotgun and Spanky. They have cynically sought to shut down clown science by demanding that I reveal to them my raw climate data, when they damn well know doing so would violate the Sacred Science Law of the Clowns. Do not be deceived. Shotgun and Spanky have never worked in either a tenure track university or circus, and therefore do not have proper clown credentials. They are merely rodeo clowns, mercenaries for beef industry plutocrats like Ronald McDonald who are desperate to avoid restrictions on their precious methane.

I am confident, however, that this misconception will be corrected once the public has the real facts. I am now collaborating with Nobel Prize medalist Al Gore on a new 50 city three-ring awareness tour to assure the public that the miming is settled. Get your tickets online before December 31st and you're automatically registered for a free carbon credit gift pack from Goreco!

And if that still isn't enough to convince you that man-made climate change is scary? Then I'll be happy to drop by your window sometime.

This just in -- screen-shot of one of the CRU data analysis programs

Now it is time for the big boys to come out and play

DOE sends a “litigation hold notice” regarding CRU to employees – asking to “preserve documents”
It appears bigger things are brewing related to CRU’s Climategate.

WUWT commenter J.C. writes in comments:

I work at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. I’ve been following the Climategate scandal since its inception. The first time many of my coworkers had heard of the situation was when I asked them about it.

Well, well, well.

Look what was waiting in every single email Inbox on Monday morning:

______________________________________________
“December 14, 2009
DOE Litigation Hold Notice

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

As a reminder, this Litigation Hold preservation obligation supersedes any existing statutory or regulatory document retention period or destructive schedule. The determination of what information may be potentially relevant is based upon content and substance and generally does not depend on the type of medium on which the information exists. The information requested may exist in various forms, including paper records, hand-written notes, telephone log entries, email, and other electronic communication (including voicemail), word processing documents (including drafts, spreadsheets, databases, and calendars), telephone logs, electronic address books, PDAs (like Palm Pilots and Blackberries), internet usage files, systems manuals, and network access information in their original format. All ESI should be preserved in its originally-created, or “native” format, along with related metadata. Relevant backup tapes and all indexes for those tapes should also be preserved. Further, information that is reasonably accessible must nonetheless be preserved, because such sources will, at the very least, need to be identified and, under compelling circumstances, may need to be produced.

If you have any doubts as to whether specific information is responsive, err on the side of preserving that information.

Any employee who has information covered by this Litigation Hold is requested to contact Madeline Screven, Paralegal, SRNS Office of General Council, 5-4634, for additional instructions.

Michael L. Wamsted
Associate General Council”
_______________________________________________

Everyone on-site who has an email account received this letter. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000 people. How about that?
And this is the first official mention of the entire subject that I have seen.

Climate Change
The Office of Policy and International Affairs (PI) serves as the focal point within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for the development, coordination, and implementation of DOE-related aspects of climate change technical programs, policies, and initiatives. The Office of Climate Change Policy and Technology, located within PI, provides supporting policy, planning, technical and analytical services to carry out this function. To the extent delegated by the Secretary, the Office provides similar services to other Federal agencies and to Cabinet and sub-Cabinet-level interagency policy committees that work on climate change-related policy, science, technology, and greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation programs.

Good analogy for Copenhagen

“Social Justice” (Socialism) is what warmists yearn for … not global cooling
The forebodings the Jews of Europe had as they were herded onto cattle cars to an unknown destination are the same feelings of helplessness I have as the Copenhagen Climate Summit reaches its conclusion. It is the concern that unaccountable, unelected and unresponsive individuals will seal my fate and squander my assets to bring “social justice” to the world. Make no mistake, global warmists are more interested in achieving an agenda of undoing Westernism than cooling the planet. It is Westernism that has brought unbridled prosperity to most of the world, and where it doesn’t exist (North Korea, Cuba, Myanmar for instance) it leads to abject poverty and suffering. Yet it is our very prosperity they seek to destroy.

I’m not sure what “social justice” is precisely, other than it is preached from the pulpit of the likes of the Reverend Wright when he attacks “rich white people.” And it is being preached from the pulpits of liberal newspapers. I think it is what Joe the plumber objected to. But most of all I don’t understand how transferring the world’s treasure to corrupt regimes will ever alleviate poverty in those countries. It hasn’t before and there is no reason to believe it will in the future. But read a sample of the misguided logic from the liberal Guardian:

Social justice demands that the industrialized world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them.

When Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, found it couldn’t feed itself because Mugabe’s racist policies forced productive white farmers off their farms, the UN came to the rescue. It provided free maize (corn) to the government to feed its people. But then the government of Zimbabwe sold this gift to acquire foreign exchange. When the UN insisted its personnel oversee the distribution of its largesse to the hungry, Mugabe kicked them out. All efforts to alleviate misery were stymied unless it enriched the corrupt regime.

I was wrong about the weather here...

People unclear on the concept

Frigid climate protest
About 120 people braved frigid conditions to show initiative and demand leadership from politicians engaged in international climate change talks in Copenhagen, say ralliers.

"It doesn't matter what the temperature, we have to have our voices heard in Alberta," said Susan Miller, icicles clinging to her eyelashes in the -29 C cold on the steps of the Alberta legislature last night.

"Who knows what could happen in 50 years? If we don't do something about (climate change) now, this (weather) might be mild, or we might not even have winters," said Brian Johnson through a full-face balaclava.

Dangerously cold weather hits Prairies
Dangerously cold temperatures have settled in across much of the Prairies and northern Ontario this weekend.

Environment Canada has issued warnings, saying the wind chill could reach -50C.

So true

Talking 'bout the weather

A snowy dusting in Victoria's summer
Most people consider summer a time to wear shorts and thongs wherever one pleases, with little thought of ski jackets or snowboards. However Victoria's Mount Baw Baw saw a light dusting of snow, and it's already two weeks into summer.

A cold front crossed the nation's southeast during Thursday, bringing gusty winds and some good falls to southern Victoria.

Winter weather increases dolphin, turtle strandings
The high tides and harsh winds have wreaked havoc on marine mammals in the past 10 days, causing several dolphin strandings, according to a local animal rescue official.

The past week and a half has brought almost "a dolphin a day" stranding on Cape shorelines, said C.T. Harry, assistant coordinator of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's stranding network.

Early yesterday morning, the stranding team was busy responded to a sick common dolphin at Rock Harbor, Harry said. Then they were headed to Campround Beach in Eastham for another dolphin stranded and struggling in ice-covered water, according to the Eastham police and Harry.

The high tides, strong winds and now bitter cold have combined to make it difficult for the marine mammals moving through the region, Harry said. It was 2-degrees with the wind chill at Rock Harbor Friday, Harry said.

Snowstorm buries central Ontario
A storm blasted heavy snow through central Ontario Friday, and was expected to bury some areas waist-deep overnight, forcing the closure of a major highway.

A snow squall warning was in effect through much of the region east of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay Friday evening. Strong, cold westerly winds coming off the lake were generating whiteout conditions, Environment Canada reported.

West Parry Sound OPP closed a section of Highway 400 until further notice due to deteriorating weather and road conditions.

Rainstorm wallops Southern California
The strongest of three back-to-back rainstorms is expected to clear out by midday today after walloping Southern California on Saturday, sending mud and rocks tumbling onto roads, trapping about 90 vehicles on mountainous Angeles Crest Highway for hours and causing officials to issue mandatory evacuation orders for more than 40 homes.

There were no reports of major damage or injuries late Saturday night. But more rainfall was expected overnight and into the morning, further saturating wildfire-denuded hillsides.

An insightful interview at Copenhagen

The Gore effect hits Copenhagen

An inconvenient question - seeking truth, being shut down

The fifteen reasons why...

Why they fell for the global warming hoax
They called us Global Warming Holocaust Deniers — sneered at us, snarked at us, and snubbed us.

None of them bothered to read “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

I have no time for paybacks or saying I told you so.

But pay attention to why they fell for this billion-dollar hoax which almost became a trillion-dollar tragedy.

1. The pseudo-intellectuals fell for it because none of them ever cracked a science book.
2. The policy wonks fell for it because it gave the government more control.
3. The bleeding hearts fell for it because they always want to save the Earth.
4. The communists fell for it because it portrayed capitalists as destroying the Earth to make money.
5. The capitalists fell for it because they saw a new way to make money.
6. The Hollywood crowd fell for it because it made their pampered lives seem to have a meaning and purpose.
7. The newspapers fell for it because it was new.
8. The teachers fell for it because it was a new thing to teach the children to teach their parents.
9. The children fell for it because they wanted to show how well they are doing in school.
10. The parents fell for it because they wanted their children were doing so well in school and they wanted to be supportive.
11. The utility companies fell or it because they can raise rates.
12. The Nobel Peace Prize committee fell for it because Al Gore should have won in 2000.
13. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fell for it because Al Gore should have won in 2000.
14. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (Grammys) fell for it because Al Gore should have won in 2000.
15. The 30,000 scientists fell for it because while it was not in their field of study, they wanted to be supportive of science.

The only people who didn’t fall for it were we mouth-breathing, Bible-thumping, beer-guzzling, cousin-humping, baby-bumping, overfed, inbred, illiterate, gun-clinging, buck-toothed, trailer-park-living, truck-driving, ATV riding, Wal-mart shopping, knuckle-dragging, military-supporting, ain’t-recycling, patriotic, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, racist hillbillies with cooties.

Cold all over

Dec. 9: Residents of Freeport, Ill., shovel a foot of snow on
State Avenue. At least 17 have died in
the severe winter storms across the U.S.
AP Photo

Huge Snowstorm Batters U.S., Leaving at Least 17 Dead
DES MOINES, Iowa — A deadly, windy storm that tortured a wide swath of the country for days threatened to drop a foot or more of snow on parts of New York, Pennsylvania and New England Thursday before finally blowing off the coast of Maine.

Commuters from Des Moines to Chicago braced for single digit temperatures and icy roads, while wind chill values as low as negative 25 were forecast for parts of Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois.

"Like I stuck my face in the freezer," was how Bincy Mathew described the Chicago air.

The storm will have affected about two-thirds of the country by the time it moves out Thursday night, and has been blamed for at least 17 deaths, most in traffic accidents.

Record lows overnight: 18 degrees at Sea-Tac, 6 degrees in Olympia
The temperature dipped to 18 degrees this morning at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, setting a record low for the date.

Meteorologist Johnny Burg at the National Weather Service office in Seattle said the previous record low at Sea-Tac for the date was 21, set in 1972.

Olympia also set a record low of 6, Burg said, breaking the 1972 record of 10.

Follow the Money

Follow the money
This is stolen from the comments at WUWT:

A reader commented as follows:

... it is possible that this is just a big conspiracy by climate scientist around the world to boost their cause and make themselves more important. Though I find it hard to believe that thousands of scientists...all agreed to promote bogus science ...Pretty hard to do without being discovered.

To which another reader, a scientist named Paul Vaughan, responded as follows:

Actually not so hard.
Personal anecdote:

Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW.
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.

This confirms the stories that I've been hearing over the last few years.

A similar anecdote:

A friend is a lecturer in a Higher Education establishment (an agricultural college in fact; I won't say more because there are not many and he won't want to be identified).

He showed me their prospectus for next year's courses. It is entirely stuffed with wibble about "green farming", "environmental" this that and the next thing, "low-carbon" so-and-so, and is suffused with the underlying assumption that the AGW hypothesis is completely true and unchallengeable.

I commented on this.

He agreed, and pointed out that "if you don't do this stuff, you won't get any funding".

Q.E.D.

As an interesting comment a few months back I reviewed a short technical paper on gas diffucion through butyl rubber septa that are used to seal sampling vials (vacutainers etc.) The opening sentence in the introduction was 'With the onset of global warming.....'

http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/stim09c.htm
"The final bill provides $3.5 billion for energy R&D at the Department of Energy (DOE) and would fund climate change-related projects in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)"

It's that Sun thing again...

Solar geomagnetic activity is at an all time low – what does this mean for climate?
I’ve mentioned this solar data on WUWT several times, it bears repeating again. Yesterday, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released their latest data and graph of the interplanetary geomagnetic index (Ap) which is a proxy for the activity of the solar dynamo. Here is the data provided by SWPC. Note the graph, which I’ve annotated below.

At a time when many predicted a ramp up in solar activity, the sun remains in a funk, spotless and quiet. The Ap value, for the second straight month, is “3″. The blue line showing the smoothed value, suggests the trend continues downward. To get an idea of how significant this is in our history, take a look at this data (graph produced by me) from Dr. Leif Svalgaard back to the 1930’s.

The step change in October 2005 is still visible and the value of 3.9 that occurred in April of this year is the lowest for the entire dataset at that time. I’m hoping Dr. Svalgaard will have updated data for us soon.

A kid and his dad trump the "climate experts" using their own data

Timing is a bit off but the irony is delightful

Siberian Blast about to hit Europe and The Summit!
All down to Global Warming of course!

9 Dec 09 - Email from a reader in the UK

Robert,

Take a look at what is forecast for Europe next weekend, a full on Siberian blast 70’s style!

Can’t wait for the poor summit pictures, all down to Global Warming of course! Copenhagen is under the -15C!

Brilliant, you would have thought that they would have scheduled this for a summer conference at least.

Seriously, there is some major winter weather about the hit Europe, all down to a huge mid-latitude blocking High near Greenland, and these a very difficult to shift if the cold pool becomes established.

Great site.
Regards

Adrian Rowley

A breath of fresh air in Copenhagen

Copenhagen climate summit: global warming 'caused by sun's radiation'
As the world gathered in the Danish capital for the UN Climate Change Conference, more than 50 scientists, businessmen and lobby groups met to discuss the arguments against man made global warming.

Although the meeting was considerably smaller than the official gathering of 15,000 people meeting down the road, the organisers claimed it could change the course of negotiations.

Professor Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, said the recent warming period was caused by solar activity.

He said the last time the world experienced such high temperatures, during the medieval warming period, the Sun and the Earth were in a similar cycle.

Professor Nils-Axel Morner, a geologist from Stockholm University, said sea level rise has also been exaggerated by the “climate alarmists” using computer models.

He said observational data from lake sediments, coast lines and trees show sea levels have remained stable.

Professor Cliff Ollier, another geologist from the University of Western Australia, also said the environmental lobby have got it wrong on ice caps. He said the melting of ice sheets is caused by geothermal activity rather than global surface temperatures.

He said the melting of ice sheets is caused by geothermal activity rather than global surface temperatures.

Fun times in Copenhagen

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today
after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents.
Photograph: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images

A skeptics dictionary

Very nearly a hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce compiled A Devil's Dictionary, in which he sought to puncture the cultural cant of his time. Here is an attempt—at much shorter length—to prick a very contemporary kind of cant, that which has swollen the debate on climate change to ungovernable proportions.

A is for anthropogenic: (as in anthropogenic global warming, or “AGW”), a $10 word for "man-made" which global-warmists wield as proof of expertise—no one more so than Al Gore, who, after having invented the Internet, turned his prodigious mind to the conundrum of AGW.

B is for Björn Lomborg, the Danish professor whose book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, should have put Al Gore out of business forever; for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that aren’t ready to abandon the good, carbon-burning life just yet; and for boondoggle (see "ethanol," infra).

C is for the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, the now-discredited source of much of the data used to fuel climate hysteria. In November, in an episode that was oh-so-predictably dubbed Climategate, a cache of leaked emails showed that researchers systematically hid or manipulated data that was inconsistent with the accepted narrative of man-made climate change. (Read John Tierney's clear-headed critique here.) Don't forget carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless gas once considered essential to life on earth, not to mention bubbles in Champagne. (Although it's now regarded as a poisonous pollutant, you can, however, trade it.) Think also of consensus — the idea that science is settled by an asserted poll of experts after all objections from dissenting scientists have been suppressed.

Color me surprised (not so much)

Denmark rife with CO2 fraud
Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

Denmark’s quota register, which the Energy Agency within the Climate and Energy Ministry administers, is the largest in the world in terms of personal quota registrations. It is much easier to register here than in other countries, where it can take up to three months to be approved.

Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.

The market for CO2 trade has exploded in recent years and is worth an estimated 675 billion kroner globally.

Global Warmingists

Always classy - Professor Andrew Watson

It's just that warming thing

Al Gore Cancels $1,200 Per Handshake Event In Copenhagen
Al Gore apparently has canceled a high-priced speaking engagement during the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen.

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, the Nobel Laureate was slated to lecture about his new book "Our Choice" where attendees could pay over $1,200 a ticket for the right to meet the Global Warmingist-in-Chief and have their picture taken with him.

According to Danish newspaper Berlingske, this has been canceled due to "unforeseen changes" to Gore's schedule.

A simple idea

Jon Stewart Talks Climategate

Monckton weighs in on Climategate

Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better.

In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to tax and regulate the world’s wealthier nations for its own enrichment: in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is now known to be the non-problem of manmade “global warming”.

Climategate roundup

Break out the whitewash...

Mann to be investigated by Penn State University review
This statement was released by Penn State here. Oddly, while mentioning the NAS report, there is no mention of the Congressional commissioned Wegman report, which you can see here full report (PDF). Or for a quick read the fact-sheet (PDF).

University Reviewing Recent Reports on Climate Information
Professor Michael Mann is a highly regarded member of the Penn State faculty conducting research on climate change. Professor Mann’s research papers have been published in well respected peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In November 2005, Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) requested that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convene a panel of independent experts to investigate Professor Mann’s seminal 1999 reconstruction of the global surface temperature over the past 1,000 years. The resulting 2006 report of the NAS panel (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676) concluded that Mann’s results were sound and has been subsequently supported by an array of evidence that includes additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions.

In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised.

Another view of the CRU code leak

Anthropogenic Global Warming Will Lose Geeks Thanks To Bad Code
I'd venture that most software geeks are fairly leftist and generally support the theory that human activity is causing global warming. In that light, the biggest revelation from the recently hacked global warming emails might be the awfulness of the climate simulation code.

I've examined two files in some depth and found (OK so Harry found some of this)

Inappropriate programming language usage
Totally nuts shell tricks
Hard coded constant files
Incoherent file naming conventions
Use of program libray subroutines that appear to be:

far from ideal in how they do things when they work
do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing
but which fail at undefined times
and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error

AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!

More code analysis.

I'm pretty proficient at writing simulation software: it's how I earned my PhD and how I earn a living. I've also worked closely with self-trained programmers who only write code to advance their research in other fields, and I can tell you that their code is almost always terrible. Writing good software is extremely difficult, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the climate modeling software is so bad as to be useless. It is always wise to be skeptical about the outputs of simulations, especially if you cannot see the source code for yourself.

Up to this point, it was difficult to challenge the conclusions of AGW-believing climate scientists because most geeks don't have much expertise in climatology. We tend to consider ourselves scientists and to give other scientists in other areas of expertise the benefit of the doubt. Without a great deal of experience in climatology, it's hard for a geek to justify spending much time questioning the modes and methods of professional climate researchers.

However, the email leak has changed all this. Along with a hoard of emails, some source code for the computer climate models was also hacked and released to the public -- and the source code is an unusable mess. It doesn't take expertise in climatology to look at source code and determine that the code is garbage. There are many more geeks with software expertise than with climate expertise, and the geek community will go through every line of code and likely conclude that the computer models are so flawed that any conclusions drawn on them are without merit.

Despite the liberal tendencies of many geeks, I believe that the source code evidence will be insurmountable for most. Some will continue to cling to AGW because of a devotion to left-wing politics, but the majority of geeks will abandon their belief, and that abandonment by geeks will truly spell the end for AGW.

Heh - Canadian Broadcasting and Climategate

Let's hope not

Momentum grows for Copenhagen climate deal
World leaders on Friday rallied to a diplomatic offensive to forge a U.N. climate deal in Copenhagen next month and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said an agreement was "within reach".

Ban, and Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen who will host the December 7-18 U.N. climate talks, hailed what they portrayed as a growing international momentum toward a pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming.

"Our common goal is to achieve a firm foundation for a legally binding climate treaty as early as possible in 2010. I am confident that we are on track to do this," Ban told a summit of Commonwealth leaders in Trinidad and Tobago.

"Each week brings new commitments and pledges -- from industrialized countries, emerging economies and developing countries alike," he added.

"An agreement is within reach ... We must seal a deal in Copenhagen," Ban said. He, Rasmussen and French President Nicloas Sarkozy attended the summit of the 53-nation Commonwealth as special guests to lobby on Friday for international consensus on a climate pact.

A Climatologist speaks out on the CRU 'leak'

The other shoe drops - the CRU code

The code
This is a new thread for updates on the analyses of the data and code freed from CRU.

Everybody, I'm sinking under weight of things to do here. I need you to post one or two line analyses of what you are finding in which bits of code. I'll transfer these to the main post as they come in. It needs to be in layman's language and to have a link to your work.

CRU code

• Francis at L'Ombre De L'Olivier says the coding language is inappropriate. Also inappropriate use of hard coding, incoherent file naming conventions, subroutines that fail without telling the user, etc etc.
• AJStrata discovered a file with two runs of CRU land temp data which show no global warming per the data laid out by country, and another CRU file showing their sampling error to be +/- 1°C or worse for most of the globe. Both CRU files show there has been no significant warming post 1960 era
• A commenter notes the following comment in some of the code:"***** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********"
• Good layman's summary of some of the coding issues with a file called "Harry". This appears to be the records of some poor soul trying to make sense of how the code for producing the CRU temperature records works. (rude words though, if you're a sensitive type)
• Some of annotations of the Harry code are priceless - "OH **** THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."

One brief comment

Last word on Anthropogenic Global Warming (for today anyway...)

The gift that keeps on giving...

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force.

Colleagues--
I append here an e-mail correspondence I have engaged in over the past few days trying to educate a Soon/Baliunas supporter who originally wrote to me asking how I could think that Soon and Baliunas are wrong and Mann et al. are right (a view attributed to me, correctly, in the Harvard Crimson). This individual apparently runs a web site on which he had been touting the Soon/Baliunas position.

While it is sometimes a mistake to get into these exchanges (because one's interlocutor turns out to be ineducable and/or just looking for a quote to reproduce out of context in an attempt to embarrass you), there was something about this guy's formulations that made me think, at each round, that it might be worth responding. In the end, a couple of colleagues with whom I have shared this exchange already have suggested that its content would be of interest to others, and so I am sending it to our "environmental science and policy breakfast" list for your entertainment and, possibly, future breakfast discussion.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike MacCracken [mailto:mmaccrac@xxxx]
Sent: 03 January 2009 16:44
To: Phil Jones; Folland, Chris
Cc: John Holdren; Rosina Bierbaum
Subject: Temperatures in 2009

Dear Phil and Chris--

Your prediction for 2009 is very interesting (see note below for notice that went around to email list for a lot of US Congressional staff)--and I would expect the analysis you have done is correct. But, I have one nagging question, and that is how much SO2/sulfate is being generated by the rising emissions from China and India (I know that at least some plants are using desulfurization--but that antidotes are not an inventory). I worry that what the western nations did in the mid 20th century is going to be what the eastern nations do in the next few decades--go to tall stacks so that, for the near-term, "dilution is the solution to pollution". While I understand there are efforts to get much better inventories of CO2 emissions from these nations, when I asked a US EPA representative if their efforts were going to also inventory SO2 emissions (amount and height of emission), I was told they were not. So, it seems, the scientific uncertainty generated by not having good data from the mid-20th century is going to be repeated in the early 21st century (satellites may help on optical depth, but it would really help to know what is being emitted).

That there is a large potential for a cooling influence is sort of evident in the IPCC figure about the present sulfate distribution--most is right over China, for example, suggesting that the emissions are near the surface--something also that is, so to speak, 'clear' from the very poor visibility and air quality in China and India. So, the quick, fast, cheap fix is to put the SO2 out through tall stacks. The cooling potential also seems quite large as the plume would go out over the ocean with its low albedo--and right where a lot of water vapor is evaporated, so maybe one pulls down the water vapor feedback a little and this amplifies the sulfate cooling influence.

Now, I am not at all sure that having more tropospheric sulfate would be a bad idea as it would limit warming--I even have started suggesting that the least expensive and quickest geoengineering approach to limit global warming would be to enhance the sulfate loading--or at the very least we need to maintain the current sulfate cooling offset while we reduce CO2 emissions (and presumably therefore, SO2 emissions, unless we manage things) or we will get an extra bump of warming. Sure, a bit more acid deposition, but it is not harmful over the ocean (so we only/mainly emit for trajectories heading out over the ocean) and the impacts of deposition may well be less that for global warming (will be a tough comparison, but likely worth looking at). Indeed, rather than go to stratospheric sulfate injections, I am leaning toward tropospheric, but only during periods when trajectories are heading over ocean and material won't get rained out for 10 days or so.

Would be an interesting issue to do research on--see what could be done.

In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability--that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us--the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.

We all, and you all in particular, need to be prepared.

Best, Mike MacCracken

-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx]
Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009

Tim, Chris,
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug's paper that said something like - half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!
Still a way to go before 2014.

I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Chris - I presume the Met Office continually monitor the weather forecasts. Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems a bit over the top re the cold. Where I've been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.

The CRU emails online

A list of the more outrageous emails

Climate cuttings 33
Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you. If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
• Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
• Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
• Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.(1255352257)
• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi's paper is crap.(1257532857)

Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion

Damage Control

Now that didn't take long

Reading the emails - 1255352257.txt

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: xxxx
To: xxxx
Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:25:53 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: BBC U-turn on climate
Steve,
You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on Friday wrote that there's been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next 20-30 years. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as are other skeptics' views.

BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US.

Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?

What happened to global warming?
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

The BBC's amazing U-turn on climate change
I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that. The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.

“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy. The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.

Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.

Reading through 1,073 emails

That is why it is important for us to get money from additional sources, in particular from the ADVANCE and INTAS ones. Also, it is important for us if you can transfer the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier and the sum for one occasion transfer (for example, during one day) will not be more than 10,000 USD. Only in this case we can avoid big taxes and use money for our work as much as possible.

Should not have been so Μολών λαβέ to Gaia last night

Some days, the weather actually is out to kill you