Climatology

Rodney Hide discusses the Green taliban’s lack of recent focus on global warming, now that they have all realised they have been rumbled.

[T]he shift on global warming with the Greens is significant. We are safe in concluding that they no longer regard global warming as the greatest threat to the planet. It would, I think, merit a mention in a leader’s annual speech to the Greens if it were. A fast-approaching environmental armageddon would be top of mind, not the constitutionality of parliamentary legislation, and not Peter Dunne’s emails.

So, hallelujah. The polar bears can continue to float about on their ice floes, millions of environmental refugees won’t wash up on our shores, malaria won’t be making an unwanted appearance in New Zealand any time soon, our beachfront properties are safe and there is no need to feel guilty driving past that bus stop.

It was always going to end with a whimper, not a bang. The scare was so big, so dominating, so accepted, that it could not be sustained. Unless, of course, it was true. It’s now not possible to maintain the huff and puff that the media and politics need to keep the headlines running.  Read more »

The evidence is mounting that all the models the world claimed proved the science was settled have been nothing more than a fantasy.

Courtesy of John Christy, and based upon data from the KNMI Climate Explorer, below is a comparison of 44 climate models versus the UAH and RSS satellite observations for global lower tropospheric temperature variations, for the period 1979-2012 from the satellites, and for 1975 – 2025 for the models:

Read more »

Climate scientists are struggling…struggling to explain what happened to global warming, which is stalled or not happening at all. For years we have heard that the science is settled…but it would appear from this Reuter report that the science is far from settled.

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.  Read more »

James Delingpole calls out Britian’s Chief Scientist on his chicken little claims that global warming was mankind’s largest peril.

Sir John Beddington, the government’s retiring Chief Scientist has been doing the media rounds today, telling anyone who’ll listen how “Climate Change” is still a serious problem about which we should all worry greatly.

Has he looked out of the window recently?

Looking out of my window just now, I noticed that the Northamptonshire landscape was completely blanketed in Dr David Viner. Just like it was yesterday. And the day before that, when we rescued two orphaned lambs from the frozen fields. Which isn’t something you normally expect in March, is it?  Read more »

The Green Party is an insignificant force in UK politics, with only one MP in their bloated House of Commons.  But the UK is still crushed under the Green Thumb, partly because of the bureaucratic loons of the EU, and partly because their Government is a coalition of the wettest, weakest, trough-loving Tories in history and their minority partners, the creepy intern-molesting chardonnay-left Liberal Democrats.

And as a result, their economy is stuffed and old people are freezing to death because they can’t pay huge power bills while land-owning Dukes are trousering a fortune in wind-farm subsidies.

This is what the Global Warming scam and its apologists and profiteers have done, even with a Conservative government.

Hopefully, Kiwis are slowly waking up to the scandalous Green Taliban attack on the world and its people.

From The Independent, Monday, March 20, 2000, a story headlined: ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.’

It quoted Dr David Viner, head of the climate unit at the University of East Anglia, as saying that in future: ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’

That would be the same Dr David Viner whose department was accused of suppressing the existence of evidence casting doubt on global warming.  Read more »

Climate Change has been blamed for many, many things. The list is extensive.

Now we can add Syria’s civil war to the list as being blamed on climate change.

What next…blaming gay marriage on climate change as well?

Did anyone notice that an idiot dictator controlled the country and everyone got sick of him?

Image:US Department of Agriculture www.pecad.fas.usda.gov

A new report by the Center for Climate and Security has added evidence tosuspicions that climate change played a role in sparking Syria’s revolution.  Read more »

Despite the glorious rainfall today there are still claims by many that the drought currently being experienced by most of the country is somehow linked with climate change and that we should get used to this. Perhaps we should stop listening to NIWA, the assorted climate alarmists and start listening to Princeton and Australian National University:

Released late last year (November) by Princeton and ANU:

A series of recent droughts from Australia to the United States has led some scientists to warn that global warming has already begun to increase worldwide drought. But new research from Princeton and the Australian National University in Canberra has found that this might not be the case…..

…A new analysis of drought conditions over the past 50 years has yielded a nuanced view of global trends. Red areas have experienced increasing levels of drought while blue areas have become less prone to dry conditions. Overall, there has been less of a trend toward drought globally than previously thought, Princeton researchers have found. (Image courtesy of Justin Sheffield)….

….The greater detail of the Princeton model does mean it is more difficult to use and requires a far greater amount of data than other estimates. In fact, the researchers said the data requirements precluded its widespread use by climate scientists until relatively recently, when better satellite coverage and improvements in global data from ground weather stations provided more extensive and reliable estimates of meteorological variables such as precipitation, humidity and wind speed…..

So two questions:

When did Salinger leave NIWA?

Does NIWA used the discredited Palmer Drought Index or are they using the new Princeton Model?

Christopher Booker looks at the mounting evidence that global warming is real.

Read this and wonder why seemingly intelligent people like David Farrar make silly statements like:

My position on climate change is that greenhouse gas emissions beyond doubt cause warming. There is a legitimate debate about how much warming will occur, as we do not know for sure how the rest of the very complex climatic system will respond.

And about that warming that David says is beyond doubt?

In convincing the world that we must make such a dramatic response to man-made climate change, nothing has been more persuasive than those graphs that purport to show global temperature soaring to dangerous levels.

That iconic “hockey stick” graph, showing temperatures recently shooting up into the stratosphere, may now have been discredited. But just as important have been all those graphs showing how temperatures have changed in recent decades. These have the effect of greatly exaggerating those changes, by narrowly focusing just on what are called temperature “anomalies”, showing how they have risen and fallen round their average level in the past 30-odd years.

What the graphs do not show is the actual level of global temperature, as it is measured above freezing point. In other words, they leave out by far the greater part of the total picture. So the respected Canadian environmental writer, Lawrence Solomon, recently had the bright idea of publishing in his Financial Post newspaper column a graph showing the temperature changes of the past 15 years in proper perspective, using figures from the most prestigious of all official temperature records, compiled by the UK Met Office and its Hadley Centre.  Read more »

129 scientists have signed an open letter to Ban Ki-Moon about his comments regarding climate change:

On November 9 this year you told the General Assembly: “Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal … Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to … even larger climate shocks … and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015 … This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”

On November 13 you said at Yale: “The science is clear; we should waste no more time on that debate.”

The following day, in Al Gore’s “Dirty Weather” Webcast, you spoke of “more severe storms, harsher droughts, greater floods”, concluding: “Two weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States. A nation saw the reality of climate change. The recovery will cost tens of billions of dollars. The cost of inaction will be even higher. We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.”

We the undersigned, qualified in climate-related matters, wish to state that current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions.

The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years. During this period, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations rose by nearly 9% to now constitute 0.039% of the atmosphere. Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.

The “even larger climate shocks” you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed. Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically. The hypothesis that our emissions of CO₂ have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence.

The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in the future. The U.N.’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its Special Report on Extreme Weather (2012) that there is “an absence of an attributable climate change signal” in trends in extreme weather losses to date. The funds currently dedicated to trying to stop extreme weather should therefore be diverted to strengthening our infrastructure so as to be able to withstand these inevitable, natural events, and to helping communities rebuild after natural catastrophes such as tropical storm Sandy.

There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computer models now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects.

Continue reading…

New research shows that far from the strident claims of warmists there is not “unprecedented warming“, it in fact has happened just like now more than 1000 years ago.

This new analysis shows that the warming we have seen in the late-20th century is not unprecedented, as can be seen in figure 5 (from the paper). Seen in the reconstruction is a well-defined peak of temperature between 950–1050 AD. They also find that the first millennium is warmer than the second.

Reconstruction of the extra-tropical NH mean temperature (C) based on the gray-shaded proxies in Table 1 reaching back to at least 300 AD. Calibration period 1880–1960AD. Only proxies with positive correlations and a p-value less than 0.01 are used. The included proxies are given in the legend. Thin curves are annual values; thick curves are 50-yr smoothed. Red curves show bias and confidence intervals for the 50-yr smoothed values. From ensemble pseudo-proxy studies mimicking the reconstructions, we have calculated the distribution of 50-yr smoothed differences between reconstructions and target. The biases and the upper and lower 2.5% quantiles are calculated from these distributions. In the figure the biases (full red curves) have been added to the real-world reconstructions. Likewise, the upper and lower quantiles have been added to the real-world reconstructions (dashed red curves). The green curve shows the observed extra-tropical (>30 N) annual mean temperature. The yellow curve show the temperature average over grid-cells with accepted proxies. Both curves have been centered to zero in 1880–1960 AD.

 

The researchers conclude:

“The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) in the second half of the 10th century, equaling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions.”

The link to the journal is here.