Climate Change

Apparently the big freeze going on in Europe is because of the now ice free Barents and Kara seas:

The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence.

The evidence is mounting that Global Warming is a crock.

James Delingpole thinks we should start getting angry about the massive fraud perpetrated against us by “climate scientists”:

So, to recap: a scientist from arguably Britain’s most discredited university department – the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA – made a fool of himself and his employer by feeding to a newspaper wrongheaded disaster scenarios based on woefully inaccurate computer projections, thus lending spurious credibility to a massive media scaremongering campaign which has led to the squandering of billions of pounds on an entirely unnecessary scheme to “decarbonise” the UK economy. His reward for this was to be granted a taxpayer-funded salary to go round the world spreading more abject nonsense about a mostly non-existent threat called “climate change.”

Viner is not the exception: he is the rule. We have a right, I think, to start getting very angry indeed.

Further there is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal signed by 16 distinguished scientists noting the continuing absence of global warming. The are proper scientists not climate scientists and they say:

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.

It would seem that the fake “consensus” is splintering. I’m with James Delingpole…we should be angry.

While the chicken little panic artists are still trying to convince us all that the world is doomed from global warming and that the planet has reached a tipping point it seems that the planet is just ignoring them:

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.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

We may well be heading for substantial cooling…of course the same embedded scientists currently reaping billions in research will all intone now that man has caused the catastrophic cooling we will be experiencing and now we need more taxes to further fix what Ironically they were trying to do all along.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a  92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Brrrr…oh it’s all climate change, we are all doomed etc etc etc

Global Warming is delivering up snow to the South Island at the moment:

Summer’s latest dose of bad weather has brought snow to the South Island.

Snow was falling and settling on Porters Pass this afternoon, and hail was falling at Arthur’s Pass, WeatherWatch.co.nz said.

MetService this morning issued a severe thunderstorm watch, which said there was a moderate risk of storms from north Canterbury to Wairarapa this afternoon.

It would bring localised rain and hail, especially in Marlborough where a few of the thunderstorms could be severe and could bring large hail of at least 20 millimetres in diameter.

Far from being the end of life as we know it, more evidence continues to surface that suggests that Climate Change, specifically the warming kind is actually good…especially for albatross:

Climate Change may have actively helped boost the survival chances of endangered albatrosses, scientists believe.

…Experts at the Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé in in Villiers en Bois, France, noticed that over that time the length of time of foraging expeditions has fallen from 13 to 10 days and the birds weigh an average of more than 2lb more.

Over the past 30 years westerly winds in the area have become faster and moved further south.

The researchers, led by Dr Henri Weimerskirch said tat the boost in the bird’s size was “one of the most unexpected changes we observed over the past 20 years”.

The study concluded: “Wandering albatrosses appear so far to have benefited from wind changes occurring in the Southern Ocean, with higher speeds allowing for more rapid travel.

“In wandering albatrosses the probability of prey encounter and capture is related to the daily distances individuals are able to cover.”

Looks like global warming has its benefits after all:

Human emissions of carbon dioxide will defer the next Ice Age, say scientists.

The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear.

Researchers used data on the Earth’s orbit and other things to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one.

In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years – but emissions have been so high that it will not.

“At current levels of CO2, even if emissions stopped now we’d probably have a long interglacial duration determined by whatever long-term processes could kick in and bring [atmospheric] CO2 down,” said Luke Skinner from Cambridge University.

Dr Skinner’s group – which also included scientists from University College London, the University of Florida and Norway’s Bergen University – calculates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin.

The current level is around 390ppm.

Other research groups have shown that even if emissions were shut off instantly, concentrations would remain elevated for at least 1,000 years, with enough heat stored in the oceans potentially to cause significant melting of polar ice and sea level rise.

Great news, I’d rather be hot than have an ice age….funny thing is the warmist would rather we all freeze, not that I care anyway it is a whole 1500 years way.

The World Bank are tits at it. Private Charities are bloody good at it. Will David Shearer’s “Does it work?” approach mean that we don’t waste money on the World Bank?

The World Bank has done almost nothing with the billions it was given to save the rainforests.

…Most of our collective CO2 emissions come from cars and power stations. We’re not going to give up driving or using electricity, and for at least the next decade, those activities will continue to generate a vast amount of CO2. Yet there are some practical steps that can be taken to reduce emissions – the most obvious being to stop the destruction of the world’s rainforests. This increases atmospheric CO2 by six billion tonnes a year, which is roughly the amount produced by the entire US economy. If we could stop rainforests being chopped down, we could make a significant dent in global CO2 emissions, and we could do it now – not in 15 or 20 years.

Some of the world’s governments have realised this. In September 2008, 14 countries, led by the US and Britain, set up a global fund for diminishing CO2 emissions. The US donated $2 billion; we put in $1.4 billion; the Germans and French gave $813 million and $300 million respectively. In total, a whopping $6.5 billion was raised, of which $1.1 billion was handed to the World Bank with instructions that it should be used, immediately, to prevent rainforest destruction.

Billions hand over to protect rainforests. What happend to the cash?

And what has happened to that money in the more than four years that have passed since then? Next to nothing. Incredibly, the World Bank has spent less than 10 per cent of the money it received. The Forest Investment Programme alone got $600 million from UK taxpayers, but the World Bank has not spent any of that money on diminishing the rate at which the world’s rainforests disappear. It has, however, spent $15 million on its own administration costs.

This is incompetence on an appalling scale. During the last four years, deforestation has put more than 20 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Britain, meanwhile, has committed itself to an almost certainly unfeasible programme of replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation by wind power – a programme which, even if it works as planned, will not have anything like the effect on emissions that a drastic reduction in the rate of rainforest destruction would.

The World Bank argues that it’s not easy to distribute money while ensuring that it is spent on the purpose for which it has been donated – especially not in places like Congo, where central government, in so far as it exists at all, is corrupt and chronically inefficient.

Asking a bureaucrat to account for something is like asking a hooker to practice chastity.

But there is a simple answer to that problem: don’t go through governments. And avoiding governments is exactly what some private charities do. For example, Cool Earth, a British charity, works through the people who live and work in the forests. By giving those people additional incentives to resist the loggers (which does not require a huge amount of money), Cool Earth has prevented the destruction of around 250,000 acres of rainforest in Peru. The project is of course small – but there is no reason whatever why the same model could not be applied on a far wider scale.

The World Bank, however, insists on going through governments and ministries. That is why it has achieved nothing except the creation of some carbon-emitting offices and a great deal of paper. It will continue to achieve nothing until it learns from small charities such as Cool Earth.

Name one single thing a government has ever done that hasn’t cost way more than the private sector could do it for. Governments are tits at providing anything other than tax collectors.

Andrew Bolt blogs about the revelation that Fairfax owns 33% of Earth Hour:

You know all that very flattering coverage that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald gives to Earth Hour?

Don’t you think the papers should have declared that their company doesn’t just support the event, but owns one third of it?

Isn’t this against the journalists’ code of ethics?

And all the while these papers run claims that sceptics are funded by Big Coal. At the very same time Big News is funding the warmists.

Now we know why the media hypes the event so much, it is because they have invested heavily in it. I bet the NZ Herald and other media outlets won’t be hyping it so much now, it is just giving coverage to their competitors.

At last a proper guide to climate change for school kids:

CLIMATE sceptic Professor Ian Plimer is arming children with 101 questions for teachers, in his new book How to Get Expelled from School.

The University of Adelaide mining geology professor and best-selling author says “pupils, parents and the public” are being fed “political propaganda”, The Advertiser reported.

The climate skeptic’s  250-page guide to climate change was written with high school students in mind.

“As a result of my previous book Heaven and Earth, I had a lot of parents write to me,” Prof Plimer said.

“They were saying that their kids are being fed environmental activism at school, rather than the basics of science, which gives them the ability to analyse activist arguments.”

Now students can carry a cheat sheet of climate questions and answers from the book, intended to embarrass, humiliate and infuriate poorly prepared teachers. Questions include: “Is climate change normal?” and “In the last 100 years, has there been global warming and global cooling?”.

“They’re questions that kids should be asking of teachers, because if the teacher can answer it means they might know something about the subject,” Prof Plimer said. “If they can’t, or start to promote ideology, it shows that our schools have been captured.

“Parents are telling me that schools have been captured by a lot of activists and kids are being fed stuff that is not relevant to the real world.”

Download an order form

Not so that you’d notice due to the distinct lack of coverage in our main stream media but there has been brewing for more than a week another storm about the Climategate emails. I wonder when the media wills tart publishing details here?

More have been released and there is even more evidence that the warmists have lied, manipulated data or even out right deleted data. Even Al Gore’s claims about kilimanjaro glaciers are debunked and even confirmed as rubbish by warmist scientists.

One of the main protaganists of global warming sent the following email. Why would Phil Jones be worrying about a “lack of warming”? I thought warming of the planet was killing us all…and here he is worrying about a lack of warming.