As Blizzard Nemo Strikes, Global Warming Won’t Be Far Behind

FROM-Town Hall

John Ransom

Blizzard Nemo is bearing down on the Northeast- hence the term nor’easter to describe it- so prepare for the folks at Fashion Week, now being held in New York City, to be out in force battling the storm.

“The organizers of New York's Fashion Week,” reports the CSMonitor, “a closely watched series of fashion shows held under a big tent – said they will have extra crews to help with snow removal and will turn up the heat and add an extra layer to the venue.”

We can only hope that they wear furs.

Because we’ll need blizzards of hilarity to withstand the up-and-coming storm, which will be the worst storm ever since, well, the last “WORST-STORM-EVER!”

However, we won’t have to brace against the snow per se; there have been plenty of monster winter storms in the Northeast that have been shrugged off, shoveled out from and tobogganed on.

Even in the midst of an outbreak of global warming, snow still, after all, eventually melts. Even in New England.

“Yes,” said Mark Twain, a resident of Connecticut, “one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty ofit.”

So, the biggest storm we’ll face won’t be Nemo, in other words; it will be the blizzard of pseudo-scientific, trash journalistic, moralizing, hypocrisizing and hyperventilating rain of ink that will tie the storm to the effects of global warming.

Al Gore can’t fart sideways today without the gas being caused by global warming.

By definition, global warming can now be defined by anything that disturbs the comfort and security of anyone who lives on the Eastern seaboard.

Read entire article

Drought! Famine! Global…Cooling?

FROM-Townhall

John Ransom

Climate experts from United Kingdom’s National Weather Service told the world that while is was not unusual for pauses in global warming that last for a decade to occur once every eighty years or so, there was no way that one could last for 15 years or more according to their climate model.

Oops. Their mistake, I guess.

Maybe that’s why when the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service updated their data and it showed that global warming has been paused for the last 16 years, they remained mum.

“The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week,” write the Daily Mail’s David Rose. “The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.”

Rose includes a nice graphic, which we have reprinted below, that shows global temperatures remaining stable since 1997, with a statistically insignificant .03 degree rise on the Celsius scale.

Read article here

Big Nature and Tiny Us

FROM-American Thinker


By Bruce Walker

Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano has forced tens of thousands of airline flights in Europe and the North Atlantic to shut down. The last time this volcano erupted, in 1821, it continued for two years. No one knows when the eruption will stop this time. This uncontrolled and unpredictable explosion of nature's power upon our lives steps across our puny civilizations with frightening ease.

Nineteen years ago, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines coughed up twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide. In Mexico, nine years earlier, the Chichón eruption perceptibly cooled the planet. Recent human history has other examples of globally cooling volcanoes. Mount St. Helens, erupting in 1980, threw gases and particles in the sky which were clearly visible for hundreds of miles.

The Icelandic Laki eruption in 1783 was believed by Ben Franklin to have cooled the planet, and thirty-two years later, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia produced the "year without a summer," in which distant New England experienced snowfalls in July. Krakatau, exactly one year after Laki, was twenty times more powerful than Mount St. Helens and cooled the planetary temperature perceptibly. These volcanoes are dramatic evidence of a mundane truth: We exercise very little power over our environment.

At a juncture of science and ideology in which acolytes of the global warming faith warn us that we appease the wrong gods, in spite of the fact that their theories show remarkably little predictive power, it should sober us all to realize that nature is much bigger than us. No one needs a hockey stick-generating software program to prove that a simple, natural volcano produces very real global cooling. What if the incidence of volcanic eruptions, as evidenced by Pinatubo, Chichón, and Eyjafjallajokull results in a significant cooling of Earth?

The Pinotubo volcano spewed twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which caused the global temperature to drop by one degree Fahrenheit. The Icelandic volcano is spewing 750 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air each second, according to the Icelandic Institute of Earth Sciences. That does not sound like a lot until one does the math: That is 2.7 million tons an hour, or 648 million tons a day. How much of that is entering the stratosphere? Atlantic Monthly reports that the ash cloud is extending seven miles into the stratosphere. So maybe this volcano will cool the Earth for a year or two.

The headline, though, is this: Big Nature and Tiny Us. Humans and their technologies are helpless against the whims of volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the other burps and hiccups of our planet. We have known for many decades that someday in the near future, California and most of the Pacific Coast might be violently tossed by the shifting of the San Andreas Fault, and whole cities and states might quickly wind up on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. What would that do to "the environment"? In the narrow and petty minds of Warmers, the consequence would be that tens of millions of internal combustion engines and modern homes would stop ruining the environment, but of course, the true impact would be vastly more deadly to man and his tenuous hold upon life here on Earth...and upon the environment of our world. Why are these busybodies not working on ways to keep plate tectonics from producing this calamity? Because no one can really stop the drift of continents, or the volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes which nature causes.

One fine day, a meteor or an asteroid may -- no, a meteor, asteroid, or similar interstellar object will -- smash into our planetary home. We will have little advance warning. There is not much we can do to stop it. We can scarcely predict when this will happen. The impact could easily cause the destruction of all human life, as well as the extermination of much animal and plant life on Earth. Despite the conflict about man-made global warming in the scientific community, there is no disagreement at all about what such a collision would do to our world. Yet the clergy of the Church of Global Warming proposes virtually nothing at all to meet this threat, which the dark ocean of outer space whispers is not an "If?" but a "When?"

Why the intense focus on a dubious and minor problem, man-made global warming, and indifference to an unquestioned and lethal problem, some future collision with an object in outer space? And why are Warmers not trying to figure out how we can stop volcanoes? Liberated man is the enemy of Warmers, and human liberty is the hated object of these Warmers. Their goal, in the simplest terms, is raw political power, whatever harm this power causes to the rest of us. They must portray man as a creature which must be regulated, licensed, and taxed into regimented slavery in a vast empire of pseudo-science. The truth -- that nature is enormous and we are puny -- would lead us to conquer what we can to make our lives safer, richer, and happier.

So, like Druid or Aztec priests before them, what we innocently do can cause spring not to come, the sun not to rise, or fire to come from the sky. Only by making sacrifices which this priestly caste defines as acceptable can our offense against nature be placated. All mischief must have a cause in the conduct of man, because otherwise we could discard our chains and live as free men, knowing that nature is so vast that we cannot comprehend it and that taming nature to our use will bring abundance and joy, rather than the wrath of invented pantheons.

More...

Oh boyoboyoboy, golly geez

The headline from Independent Daily

Antarctic ice shelf split due to global warming: Garrett

the first sentence

Global warming no doubt contributed to the shattering of a major ice shelf in Antarctica, Environment Minister Peter Garrett says....

cool man we got some science comun at us dude ain't these scientific conclussion, just crazy man bridges falling and all.

...The ice bridge linking the Wilkins Ice Shelf and two islands snapped at the weekend....

Wow it snapped at the weekend, must be some scientific term or something, let's get to the good stuff here man.

...."I don't think there is any doubt global warming is contributing to what we are seeing on the Wilkins Ice Shelf and also more generally in Antarctica," Mr Garrett told ABC television from Washington yesterday.....

Well there you go man, a scientist in Washington doesn't have any doubt, that cinches it for me, but let's hear the details of this guilt ridden man made calamity man, I just love it when we screw things up dude.

...The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, comprising peak scientific bodies from 23 countries, including Australia, will present modelling on global warming at a conference in the US shortly....

Oh boyoboyoboy, golly geez ain't this just soooo exciting! Peak mind you, PEAK I SAY scientific bodies, are going to present modelling !! At a conference OMG I can barely wait to see what they show us, I wonder if the conference is in Washington where Mr Garrett and the money...I mean the real scientist who know all about the ice bridge breaking up in Antarctica are. OK what other details are in this gripping scientific article.

...It has found ice loss has accelerated and the sea level could rise by as much as six metres by the end of the century.....

SIX METERS, like that is sooooo much dude, that's like taller than my house (should I move??) Wow that's like a gazillion times more than that obvously oil company bought out IPCC said-the liars, bunch of UN Deniers! Sure glad this Garret scientist dude is in Washington to protect us with his models.

.....Mr Garrett said he had not seen the SCAR report yet.....

OH

...."The fact is we are now entering a period where we are in a position to observe, particularly in the Antarctic, the consequences of global warming and climate change," he said.....

Yeah You the man! Give em the facts man that's what we need dude give us the facts, yeah facts man .....uh is that it? That's the article? What about the bridge dude? Was anybody on it when it fell?

Hey Dude can I play with your computer dude? What Peter Garret ain't a scientist? He's a musician? Cool man can I borrow your guitar dude. Are you gonna still do that modelling thing?

Bring in the Judge

from Columbia Daily Tribune


The jury is still out on warming

I have noticed an interesting and consistent media phenomenon: Virtually no airtime or other coverage is given to the idea that maybe, just maybe, global warming is not occurring. Or if it is occurring, it is not mankind’s fault but rather is the result of natural phenomena. It is always presented as accepted fact, axiomatic really, that it is true, it is bad and mankind is largely responsible. Me? I’m not sure.

The global warming issue is complex, but I believe the key questions can be boiled down to these four:

1. Do we live in an era of global warming?

2. If so, is it mostly man-made?

3. If so, should such a moderate temperature increase bother us more than other pressing problems?

4. If we want to change the climate, can it be done? And would our efforts be the best allocation of our always scarce resources?

Let’s get to those questions.

As to question No. 1:

The global warming theory is that manmade carbon dioxide emissions gradually build up in the atmosphere. They trap heat from the sun as in a greenhouse, which drives temperatures to catastrophic levels. We do this by burning fossil fuels like coal and oil. It’s a plausible theory, but is it true?

More and more scientists and academics are lining up to point out fluctuations in global temperatures for several thousand years correlate much more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than any rise in CO2 levels. These folks are concerned that after a century of high solar activity in the form of sunspots and flares, the radiation level is weakening, which in fact predicts a likely drop in temperatures. A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) says that, contrary to what we hear in the media, the temperatures have not risen over the past decade, even though carbon dioxide levels have been increasing. In fact, temperatures have fallen half a degree in the past 10 years. Because we are experiencing a period of reduced sunspot and other solar activity, many scientists worry we are trending to another Little Ice Age.

And what about that vaunted “scientific consensus” with respect to global warming? More and more scientists express doubts about whether global warming is occurring. In addition, science does not work by “consensus,” as Galileo and Einstein demonstrated by shattering the scientific consensus of their day.

Solar physicist Pat Brekke, a senior adviser to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo, has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the sun and solar interaction with the Earth and has served as a referee for scientific journals. Brekke, who was the deputy project scientist for the international Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and has a new book about the sun titled “SolarMax,” rejected claims of a consensus on global warming. “Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time,” Brekke said on March 2, 2008. “We could find the temperature leveling off or actually falling in the course of a 50-year period,” Brekke said. “There is much evidence that the sun’s high-activity cycle is leveling off or abating. If it is true that the sun’s activity is of great significance in determining the Earth’s climate, this reduced solar activity could work in the opposite direction to climate change caused by humans.”

So put me down as decidedly agnostic on global warming. Like more and more scientists, I believe cooling is as likely to be occurring. So does our old friend the Farmer’s Almanac, which has a good track record. A geologist named David Gee, recently chairman of the Science Committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, said it best: “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?”

As to question No. 2, is

global warming mostly man-made?

History shows us the Roman Warming period (200 B.C.-600 A.D.) was followed by a major cooling period in the Dark Ages (600-900 A.D.). From 900 to 1300 A.D. was the Medieval Warming period, which was likewise followed by the so-called Little Ice Age from 1300 A.D. to 1850 A.D. It warmed up again from 1910 to 1940 and then cooled from 1940 to the late 1970s. Though it warmed a bit after that, it has been cooling again for the past 10 years. Many of these warming periods occurred without detectable increases in CO2 levels. The Vikings were farming in Greenland — and it’s no accident it is called Greenland — in 1100 A.D. And, of course, there were no automobiles or power plants then.


The industrial revolution began about 200 years ago. There is no question that CO2 levels are up at least 35 percent over that period. Does that mean burning more fossil fuels — which creates more CO2 — is creating global warming, as so many people claim?

Well, probably not.

After all, during a good part of the past 200 years the climate was cooling but CO2 levels were rising. For example, the six-fold increase in hydro-carbon use since 1940 has had no noticeable effect on the atmospheric temperature. During the first four decades after 1940, when average CO2 levels were steadily increasing, U.S. average temperatures were in fact falling. It thus seems to me that, to date, human beings are not a significant cause of climate change. And if that is the case, one has to wonder how effective we can be in altering or stopping climate change.

Recently a group of scientists known as the Science and Environmental Policy Project issued a report titled “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.” Note this quote: “Less than half of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel burning remains in the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed by the terrestrial biosphere. ...” And this was after noting mankind accounts for only 3 percent of CO2 emissions on Earth each year.

Polling of climate scientists indicates about 30 percent are skeptical of the idea mankind is responsible for global warming. At least 31,000 scientists, including

some Nobel laureates, recently signed a manifesto called the Oregon Petition, which expresses doubt about man’s role in global warming.

Whether increases in the Earth’s temperature are attributable to mankind is questionable.

In two weeks: A discussion of questions 3 and 4.

"The Mother Of All Scares" Part 2

Taken from Christopher Bookers Presentation to the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York as

Reported by The Heartland Institute

Part 1

Part Two of the story, lasting from 1998 to 2007, we call “The Consensus Carries All Before It.” The official science grew even wilder, symbolised by the IPCC in 2001 adopting as its supreme icon Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” the graph which completely rewrote the historical record to make 1998 the hottest year in history.

No matter that within a few years Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick had turned the “hockey stick” into one of the most discredited artefacts in the history of science. By now the scare was in full swing, as governments, led by the European Union, proposed ever more ambitious measures to change the world’s climate, intended not just to meet their original Kyoto targets but to go far beyond them.

By 2005, as the EU launched its first “cap and trade” scheme, while tens of thousands of highly subsidised wind turbines rose uselessly over Europe’s countryside, the hysteria was approaching its peak. 2006 saw Al Gore’s celebrated Oscar-winning movie, so full of errors that scarcely a sentence in it was correct. By 2007 the potential bill for all the measures now being proposed by politicians across the world was so colossal that, if they were all put into effect, it would require such a drastic change in the way of life of billions of people that it is hard to imagine how modern civilisation could survive in any recognisable form.

(to be continued)

"pimple on a gnat's bum."

Man a late entry in global warming/cooling cycles

by Lee Mossel

As a geologist, I take a REALLY long view of the earth's history. I like to put the current furor over global warming, or cooling, in the perspective of history...the earth's history.

The current "debate" has been going on for, maybe, 35 years but let's be generous and call it 46 years because that's going to make the following math easier. The earth is about 4.6 billion years old. (That's 4,600,000,000!) So, we've been debating global warming for 0.000001 % of the earth's history. Man, or at least our earliest demonstrable "human" ancestors, showed up about 2.3 million years ago. (That's 2,300,000.) So, "man" has been an observer of climate change for 0.05 % of the earth's history. {I will include some references at the end of this article.}

"Ice ages" and, conversely, the intervening periods of global warming have been occurring periodically but erratically throughout geologic time from about 3.3 billion years ago or about 1 billion years after the earth formed. This means that the first "global warming" period started with the BIG BANG and lasted about 1 billion years. At least 2 multi million year long ice ages occurred before the first signs of organic, carbon based life in the form of algae or pond scum. At least 4 more ice ages occurred from the age of pond scum, through the age of creepy crawlers, fishes, amphibians, reptiles (dinosaurs) and early mammals. In the last 1 million years, during the age of man, at least 10 well documented ice ages have occurred. The last "Ice Age", and that's a nebulous term, lasted a total of about 60,000 years from 70,000 years ago until about 10,000 years ago. In North America, the timing and duration are determined by measuring the advance and retreat of glaciers. Within the overall "Ice Age", there are also shorter periods of warming and cooling. The warmer periods, in today's vernacular, would be called "global warming."

Regardless of the histrionics and hysteria on both sides of the current global warming/climate change debate, the FACTS, as represented in the rock and fossil record, clearly demonstrate that the earth warms and cools over long periods of time.

Without question, man's use of fire, dating from 1.5 million years ago and, more recently, coal, dating from about 3000 years ago, and oil and gas for the last 150 years contributed to the most recent cycle of warming. At worst, however, it looks to have "speeded up" the earth's natural cycles by only a few decades. Let's be generous, again, and say that it started speeding up when we first burned petroleum about 150 years ago. That means that man's "contribution" has affected 0.0000033 % of the earth's history; 0.0065 % of man's history; and 1.5 % of the time since the end of the last Ice Age. Mounting evidence suggests that warming MAY have peaked in the 1970s and we MAY actually be returning to a cooling phase.

Again, regardless of the rhetoric on either side of the argument, most of which is advanced by politicians and non scientists, man's total contribution to overall world wide climate change amounts to far less than the proverbial "pimple on a gnat's bum." Even if ALL of man's "contribution" were to cease immediately, the net effect on the timing of global warming OR COOLING, basically, is not measurable in the context of earth's natural cycles.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

http://www.studyworld.com/newsite/ReportEssay/science/Earth%5CThe-Ice-Age-36240.html

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/global_cooling_is_here_evidence_for_predicting_global_cooling_for_the_next_

http://library.thinkquest.org/26157/fire_use.html

http://ecology.com/features/originsoflife/

The Coming Global Cooling Crisis followed by the Global Drying Crisis

OOPs!

By Grant Martin, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2009



Has anyone asked what happens if we are "successful" with our efforts to combat Global Warming? Or have we already assumed we will fail and the best we can do is only slow it down?

Here's the scenario: years from now (hundreds or thousands?) our efforts to "go Green" actually pay off and the Globe stops warming. It is so successful that the Earth actually starts cooling (another possibility is that, as with most matters taken on by central authorities- we overshoot the desired end state and end up with a worse problem than before).

What temperature are we shooting for anyway? Do we want a cooling trend, a warming trend that is slower than today, or an absence of change (is that possible?)? Are we really sure that we can affect change on that large of a scale?

Has anyone done a cost analysis of what it will take to make significant change? In other words, take the "destruction" the majority think will happen from the path we are on now and compare it to the financial cost that it will require to keep it from happening. Of course, at some point we'd all have to come to a consensus on what level of "destruction" we are willing to accept.

All of this led me to think of another possible "crisis" we may face: A Global "Drying" Crisis. Imagine a consensus of scientists deciding the Earth is trending too dry. They recommend that to fix the problem, water must be rationed, conserved, and protected. No more washing cars, watering grass, or bottling water. They even suggest that old idea of "seeding" clouds. Anything to bring back the rain. Until someone asks what happens if flooding increases...

Seriously, though- has anyone stated a preferred end state to all this? If we are able to get over political hurdles and "attack" this problem, will we really "change the weather"? And how do we know we won't overshoot and cause the opposite problem? Or- do the scientists think it is too late already, and just want to "slow" the warming? Have we had any studies to show that is actually possible?

Huge Urban Heat Island UHI contamination in Hadley Centre-Jones-IPCC CRUT3 land temperature data over Eastern China

Errors in IPCC climate science

Now that the NASA-UAH satellite temperature data extends over a clear 30 years 1979-2008, this is a timely opportunity to check again the old IPCC canard that the various global temperature datasets are in agreement. In this case I compare the Hadley Centre CRUT3 land only data 1979-2008 with the NASA MSU LT data from University of Alabama at Huntsville, all data downloaded from the KNMI Climate Explorer.



For this grid-box over Eastern China 110 to 120 degrees East and 20 to 40 degrees North, satellites show the lower troposphere warms at 0.20 degrees per decade while the Hadley Centre land data warms at 0.46 degrees per decade. This suggests that there is 0.26 degrees per decade of urban warming in the Hadley Centre-IPCC data. A rate equivalent to 2.6 degrees per century.
This is twenty years after the UHI contamination in these Jones et al datasets was brought to the authors attention by Dr Fred Wood.

Snails emit laughing gas

Worms are not alone! here


source

A new Danish scientific report says that snails and other small animals emit worrying amounts of laughing gas into the atmosphere.


A recent proposal from the Danish Tax Commission unsuccessfully proposed imposing a flatulence tax on ruminants because of their greenhouse gas emissions. That proposal was not part of the final tax reform agreement announced on Sunday.

Now, new Danish scientific research shows that small animals such as snails, worms, larvae and crustaceans emit large and worrying amounts of nitrous oxide – also known as laughing gas – into the atmosphere.

Nitrous oxide is a strongly destructive greenhouse gas some 300 times stronger than CO2. A Team of researchers from Århus University under the leadership of Assistant Professor Peter Stief has now shown that the worst producers of nitrous oxide are smaller animals in polluted water.

Cleaner water
“The problem is greatest where water is polluted with nitrogen. So efforts to develop a cleaner aquatic environment would not just affect de-oxygenation but also have an effect on the climate balance,” says Associate Professor Andreas Schramm of the Biological Institute.

Unfortunately, however, global developments are going in the opposite direction towards more intensive agriculture and an increased use of fertilisers which will increase the amount of nitrogen seepage.

“That means more polluted aquatic environments in which small animals emit large amounts of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. This is not just a minor issue but a development that is increasingly important and is getting worse,” he tells Ritzau.

Two years of cooling has destroyed global warming consensus

from American Daily

Last June I found myself somewhere over Central America at about 37,000 feet in a 757, en route to the Andes Mountains in Peru for an annual missionary trek that I have been a part of since 1999. While getting a cup of coffee in the galley in the rear of the aircraft, I struck up a conversation with a Peruvian who wanted to know what a Gringo was doing traveling to his country for the eighth time in ten years. I explained that our treks through the mountains to visit different villages of indigenous Quechua often took us through passes or pasos de portachuelos at the edge of snow fields starting around 16,000 feet.

In ten or twenty years all the snow and ice will be gone from the Nevados of the Cordillera Blanca because of global warming, he said to me in Spanish.

So when I arrived a day later in the city of Huaraz in the Callejon de Huaylas, I was curious to see if in fact the glaciers had retreated and if the snow cover was reduced from prior years. What I learned was in fact, just the opposite—from my own photographs and from the testimonies of the people with whom I spoke over the next two weeks.

Despite the ‘consensus’ of scientists that we are told agree that global warming is a fact, I observed more snow on the mountains, the glaciers had seemingly grown in size, and the climate had become noticeably cooler. The locals—virtually all of them farmers—confirmed this. And last year was in fact the first year we had hiked through the Cordillera Negra—the more temperate and dryer range of the Peruvian Andes—and experienced cloudy days with wind-blown chilling rains.

Consensus is a dangerous thing. Remember the great scare over Y2K, when some of the most brilliant minds of our generation arrived at a “consensus” that predicted the end of the world at midnight on December 31, 1999?

In a similar vein we have the economic crisis of 2008—a grand mal version of the Bernie Madoff-Ponzi Scheme that duped some of the best minds of the finance world. The consensus of a majority of leading economists and bankers that included the then Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was that the economy was sound only months before the world imploded.

As many governments of the world including the United States are poised to burden their citizens with a carbon tax, perhaps now would be a good time to reconsider whether the consensus is again very badly mistaken.


I am speaking about the consensus over anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide-induced global warming—or should I say what used to be called ‘global warming’ until the data that poured in over the last several years showing that the earth has cooled drastically has made its hysterical proponents employ the classic bait-and-switch use of the term ‘climate change’. Now any meteorological anomaly—can serve as ‘evidence’ for Apocalypse Now.

The consensus over climate change is largely based on suspect computer models that cannot predict the weather a week into the future let alone the state of the world’s climate decades from now. Much of the science is junk science and almost all of the data is subject to interpretation by humans many of which have their own ideologically driven agendas. This has been used to rally support from celebrities who along with the government are only too willing to help support the funding of pet research projects. There’s a religious, cult-like component requiring belief in “Gaia” or “Mother Earth” embraced by global warming proponent and billionaire Sir Richard Branson and movie director M. Night Shyamalan among others. And a complicit and largely science-challenged gaggle of mainstream journalists is all-too willing to cooperate in the cause-celebre.

Climate change should neither portend the end of the world nor should it come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Earth’s climate history. There have been long epochs of warmer climate on the earth during the Medieval Warm Period, for example, which spanned 400 years from 1000-1400, and decades of colder climate such as the Little Ice Age, which spanned from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries.

It seems a touch arrogant for us humans to presume that because we have witnessed minor warming during the 20th century that this is unusual or worrisome. The book of Genesis reminds us: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” Who is to say that a slightly warmer earth would not be beneficial to mankind? During the Medieval Warm Period, infant mortality rates shrank throughout Europe as swamps dried up and the population of mosquitoes—vectors for a number of fatal diseases—shrank markedly.

My observations in the Peruvian Andes last June have been born out by a number of other scientists.

David Deming a geophysicist and Adjunct Scholar at the National Center for Policy Analysis and an Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, writing in the Washington Times on December 10 stated, “…The last two years of global cooling have nearly erased 30 years of temperature increases. To the extent that global warming ever existed, it is now officially over. This year began with a severe spell of winter weather in China.

Observers characterized it as the largest natural disaster to hit China in decades. By the end of January, blizzards and cold temperatures had killed 60 people and caused millions to lose electric service. Nearly a million buildings were damaged and airports had to close. Hong Kong had the second-longest cold spell since 1885. A temperature of 33.6 degrees Fahrenheit was barely higher than the record low of 32 degrees F set in 1893. Other countries in Asia also experienced record cold…”

But not even colder than normal weather can dissuade the ‘climate-change’ fear mongers. After Nature published the results of a computer model showing that nearly the entire Antarctic continent had not cooled over the past 50 years, as the real-world observational data showed, but had warmed instead, Christopher Monckton, Chief Policy Adviser for the Science & Public Policy Institute commented that the analysis in the ‘warming Antarctic’ paper, “depends not on actual temperature measurements, nor on other observations from the real world, which unequivocally show that Antarctica has been cooling for half a century, but on statistical ‘interpolation’ of made-up data between the rather sparse observations from Antarctic research stations.”

Ironically, the point may be moot. Fred S. Singer, President and Founder of Science and Environment Policy Project explains, “Not long ago we learned that a cooling Antarctica was ‘consistent with’ greenhouse warming and thus the skeptics were wrong. So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both ‘consistent with’ model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of ‘consistent with’ in climate science raises the perennial question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?”

Deroy Murdock, a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, explained in December that the year 2008 was the coldest since 1997. With the winter of 2008-2009 barely underway, Murdock listed among other meteorological phenomena; an 8-inch snowstorm in New Orleans, a half-inch of snow in Malibu, three-inches in Las Vegas and snow across southern Brazil. He also cited temperature data showing that last summer was the third-coldest on record for Anchorage, Alaska causing a 13.5% expansion of Arctic sea ice—an area about the size of the state of Texas.

Murdock asked Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a physical chemist and retired Navy meteorologist, “So, is this all just propaganda concocted by Chevron-funded, right-wing, flat-Earthers?” Hertzberg’s answer was interesting. “As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear-mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to science.”

Murdock quotes from a letter written to British members of Parliament last October from Imperial College of London astrophysicist and long range forecaster Piers Corbyn: “Global Warming is over, and Global Warming Theory has failed. There is no evidence that CO2 drives world temperatures or any consequent climate change…According to official data in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been colder than that year, yet CO2 has been rising rapidly.”

He adds, “That evening, as the House of Commons debated legislation on so-called ‘global warming,’ October snow fell in London for the first time since 1922.”

Gregory J. Rummo

Gregory J. Rummo has an M.S. in chemistry. He is a businessman, syndicated columnist and the author of two books; “The View from the Grass Roots,” and “The View from the Grass Roots, Another Look.” Contact him through his website, http://GregRummo.com/

Burping Worms May Contribute to Climate Change

From Fox News

Aquatic animals that feed on lake and stream bottom sediments burp out small amounts of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, a new study finds.

While the biological emissions from these critters pales in comparison to the nitrous oxide emitted by fossil fuel burning, their contribution could increase as more and more nitrogen-rich fertilizer runs off into lakes, streams and seas, the authors of the study said.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is more commonly known to anyone who has sat in the dentist's chair as laughing gas.

In the atmosphere it is a powerful greenhouse gas, packing about 310 times the punch as the same weight of carbon dioxide (though carbon dioxide is still the bigger driver because there is much more of it).

Studies of soil-dwelling earthworms had showed that the creepy crawlies emitted nitrous oxide because of the nitrogen-converting microbes they gobbled up into their guts with every mouthful of soil.

Peter Stief, of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, and his colleagues noticed that no one had ever looked for similar nitrous oxide emission in aquatic animals, so that's where they turned their attention.

"We were looking for an analogy in the aquatic system," Stief said.

The researchers found that in a variety of aquatic environments, animals that dug in the dirt for their food did indeed emit nitrous oxide, thanks to the bacteria in the soil they ate, which "survive surprisingly well in the gut environment," Stief told LiveScience.

The team's findings are detailed in the March 2 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The nitrous oxide given off by these so-called filter feeders has little global impact of course.

"We're not expecting a new catastrophe," Stief said.

But on the scale of an individual lake or stream, "the difference can be huge," Stief said — as much as an 8-fold difference between situations where animals were and were not present.

Nitrate from fertilizer runoff can exacerbate the situation because those bacteria that end up in animal guts love to feast on it.

Increased nitrogen levels can also favor algal blooms, which suck up all the oxygen in the water. This could cause a shift in the ecosystems subjected to runoff, favoring the species that are more tolerant to oxygen depletion, which also tend to be the nitrous oxide emitters.

Because these species tend to be at the bottom of the food chain, any shifts in species abundance can cascade up the food chain, Stief noted.

The findings don't mean that animals will be to blame for any future increases in nitrous oxide, because the pollution would fuel their emissions ultimately comes from humans.

"We have not discovered that the animals represent an environmental problem," Stief said.

The research was supported by a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship, the Danish Research Agency and Aarhus University, Denmark.

Scientists urged to step to plate on climate politics

from USA Today

Money and politics, the stuff of social science, now drive global warming, and climate science needs to get with it, a National Research Council report suggests.
"Demand is growing for credible, understandable and useful information for responding to climate change," says the report, called Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. The report, released Thursday, calls for "transformation" of climate science to emphasize the climate's influence on food, economics and public health....



They already are

Dark Green Doomsayers

By George F. Will


A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.
Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. Chu added: "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."
No more lettuce for Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.
In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was "cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool," glaciers had "begun to advance" and "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).


Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.
An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints and if government will "remake" the economy.
Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.
Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.





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