Posts Made By: Dave Snope

Cause for celebration at both poles. This reminds me of the day I paddled up to a glacier and got a chunk of that beautiful blue ice for cocktails to toast a friend's engagement. You have to toast to this if you like big ice caps.

Both arctic and antarctic ice caps are celebrating records this month:

Antarctic sea ice is at a record high for the month of July.


And up north, we have the slowest July (1-17) Arctic melt in the eight year JAXA record.

World food production will increase with increases in warmth or CO2. It is incredibly naive to associate only drought with warmth without also considering the increased moisture levels and increased rainfall that come with increased warmth in large climate zones.

Also, since you mentioned science, let us see what the Russian scientists have to say about this heat wave:

according to an article published today in RIA Novosti, the chief of the Russian Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Control, Alexander Frolov, stated at a press conference yesterday that the 2010 Russian heat wave "was a unique event" based on "an archive of dangerous weather situations from the past 1000 years." According to the expert, there was no similar event over this period. Translation: its weather not climate change.

An in-process paper finds that the global warming scare phenomenon is unscientific.

Effects and outcomes of the global warming alarm: A forecasting project using the structured analogies method
Kesten C. Green
International Graduate School of Business, University of South Australia
J. Scott Armstrong
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT: We summarize evidence showing that the global warming alarm movement has more of the character of a political movement than that of a scientific controversy. We then make forecasts of the effects and outcomes of this movement using a structured analysis of analogous situations—a method that has been shown to produce accurate forecasts for conflict situations. This paper summarizes the current status of this “structured analogies project.”

We searched the literature and asked diverse experts to identify phenomena that could be characterized as alarms warning of future disasters that were endorsed by scientists, politicians, and the media, and that were accompanied by calls for strong action. The search yielded 71 possible analogies. We examined objective accounts to screen the possible analogies and found that 26 met all criteria. We coded each for forecasting procedures used, the accuracy of the forecasts, the types of actions called for, and the effects of actions implemented.

Our preliminary findings are that analogous alarms were presented as “scientific,” but none were based on scientific forecasting procedures. Every alarming forecast proved to be false; the predicted adverse effects either did not occur or were minor. Costly government policies remained in place long after the predicted disasters failed to materialize. The government policies failed to prevent ill effects.

The findings appear to be insensitive to which analogies are included. The structured analogies approach suggests that the current global warming alarm is simply the latest example of a common social phenomenon: an alarm based on unscientific forecasts of a calamity. We conclude that the global warming alarm will fade, but not before much additional harm is done by governments and individuals making inferior decisions on the basis of unscientific forecasts.


Exhibit 1: Analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming

Analogy & Year

1 Population growth and famine (Malthus) 1798

2 Timber famine economic threat 1865

3 Uncontrolled reproduction and degeneration (Eugenics) 1883

4 Lead in petrol and brain and organ damage 1928

5 Soil erosion agricultural production threat 1934

6 Asbestos and lung disease 1939

7 Fluoride in drinking water health effects 1945

8 DDT and cancer 1962

9 Population growth and famine (Ehrlich) 1968

10 Global cooling; through to 1975 1970

11 Supersonic airliners, the ozone hole, and skin cancer, etc. 1970

12 Environmental tobacco smoke health effects 1971

13 Population growth and famine (Meadows) 1972

14 Industrial production and acid rain 1974

15 Organophosphate pesticide poisoning 1976

16 Electrical wiring and cancer, etc. 1979

17 CFCs, the ozone hole, and skin cancer, etc. 1985

18 Listeria in cheese 1985

19 Radon in homes and lung cancer 1985

20 Salmonella in eggs 1988

21 Environmental toxins and breast cancer 1990

22 Mad cow disease (BSE) 1996

23 Dioxin in Belgian poultry 1999

24 Mercury in fish effect on nervous system development 2004

25 Mercury in childhood inoculations and autism 2005

26 Cell phone towers and cancer, etc. 2008


http://kestencgreen.com/green&armstrong-agw-analogies.pdf

Climate scientist Roger Pielke Sr has posted today an in-press paper which demonstrates that ocean temperatures flattened in 2001-2002 and have been on a negative trend since. The ocean temperature trend is far more important than the hopelessly adjusted & flawed land temperature record to assess global warming, as noted by Dr. Pielke. During this period, CO2 levels have steadily climbed, which according to the IPCC should have caused a positive radiative imbalance resulting in about .16C warming. The fact that ocean temperatures have instead been cooling falsifies the entire anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.

"There is an excellent new paper by Bob Knox and David Douglas that provides further insight into the issue of the monitoring of global climate system heat changes. The paper is

R. S. Knox, David H. Douglass 2010: Recent energy balance of Earth International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, vol. 1, no. 3 (November) In press doi:10.4236/ijg2010.00000."

ABSTRACT: A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.


http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/09/paper-global-cooling-began-in-2003.html

Not global warming related, but it will be interesting to watch what happens with this El Nino. Will it bring a lot of extreme weather events to the globe? For us in CA, how much severe weather depends on the extent of the jet stream drop.


The current ENSO index plotted against the six strongest La Nina events shows a strong departure index and correlation to those years.

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1670-hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society.html

It's still amazing how few scientists take a public stand against the AGW scams. When it happens, it's usually retired or retiring profs who have nothing to lose in their career, no fears for loss of the grant money that sustains them and their staff. Hal is one of the 31,000 American scientists that signed the Global Warming Petition Project stating that there is no basis for the claim that man's release of gasses will cause catastrophic heating of the climate. Yet he is one of very few to take further public action.

http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_last_name.php?run=L

Get 'em while they last (the suit, or the glaciers).

This suit explores the avenue of “body” language and non-verbal communication. Intended for awkward introductory glacier encounters, it acts as an “ice breaker”, better enabling a person to lie prone on the surface of the glacier and give it a hug. Worn on the front of the body, the reflective padded material serves to mediate the difference in temperatures between the human body and the glacial ice.

The Glacier Embracing Suit:
http://itp.nyu.edu/camp/?p=3273

In this 2010 peer reviewed paper on Holocene temperature reconstructions, we find this little gem:

For example,
the annual mean temperature difference between the 500-
year periods 1251–1750 and 1501–2000 appears to be only
0.05 C for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole, according
to data from Mann et al. (2009).

It's interesting how Mann would never tell us that. Once his hockey stick was taken away from him, there was nothing left in his data to sell AGW.

And the main conclusion of the paper is that it was 2 C warmer 6000 years ago than it was in 1500 (and 1500 is the same temperature as today):

A large majority of the here investigated temperature
reconstructions indicate that temperatures were warmer at
the mid-Holocene (6000 BP±500 yrs) compared to the preindustrial
period (1500AD±500 yrs), both in summer, winter
and the annual mean. By taking simple arithmetic averages
over the available data, the reconstructions indicate that
the northern high latitudes were 0.9 C warmer in summer,
0.5 C in winter and 1.7 C warmer in the annual mean temperature
at the mid-Holocene (6 ka) compared to the recent
pre-industrial.


http://www.clim-past.net/6/591/2010/cp-6-591-2010.pdf

Japan got badly burned by the redistribution of wealth from the previous Kyoto Protocol and is having no more of it.

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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/01/cancun-climate-change-summit-japan-kyoto

Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Nino' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.
Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995.
...

One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports.

He wrote: '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'



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html#ixzz17OLBm0Rp