Thursday 19 October 2006

A year of vindication for global warming skeptics

A New Smear: Even as the phrase "climate-change deniers" is being inflated into a smear similar to "holocaust denier" -- with one Gore-touting US environmental magazine calling for "Nuremberg-style war crime trials" for members of the global warming "denial industry" -- those troublesome skeptics just aren't going away.

A New Open Letter: Sixty scientists -- including local "deniers" Augie Auer, Vincent Gray and Chris de Freitas -- have written to Canadian PM Stephen Harper "to propose that balanced, comprehensive public-consultation sessions be held so as to examine the scientific foundation of the federal government's climate-change plans. This would be entirely consistent with your recent commitment to conduct a review of the Kyoto Protocol." They argue:
Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based. Even if the climate models were realistic, the environmental impact of Canada delaying implementation of Kyoto or other greenhouse-gas reduction schemes, pending completion of consultations, would be insignificant. Directing your government to convene balanced, open hearings as soon as possible would be a most prudent and responsible course of action.

While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy
formulation. The study of global climate change is, as you have said, an "emerging science," one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.
No warming thanks, we're Southern Men: Meanwhile, despite being predicted for the last eighteen years, "catastrophic warming" is still not happening anywhere except those computer climate models, and in fact figures for the troposphere obtained from the US National Space, Science & Technology Centre and recently recalculated by separating out hemispheres suggest that even the warming that is present is only present in one hemisphere: the north. Here in the south however we're still freezing our tits off. See:

That's the global average for tropospheric temperatures shown at the top, with the northern hemisphere in the middle, and us colder cousins at the bottom. [Cambridge physicist Luboš Motl summarises here.] That 'El Nino' spike in 1988 aside, there's been nothing of note to deny down here.

Global warming? Well, maybe northern hemisphere warming. "Catastrophic" warming? I think not.

"A Year of Vindication for Global Warming Skeptics":
Rob Bradley from the Institute for Energy Research (one of those nasty members of the global warming "denial industry") has called 2006 a year of vindication for [global warming] skeptics. He summarises some of the recent highlights:
  • Global Cooling on the Horizon? In August, Khabibullo Abdusamatov, a scientist who heads the space research sector for the Russian Academy of Sciences, predicted long-term global cooling may be on the horizon due to a projected decrease in the sun's output.
  • Sun's Contribution to Warming: Recent findings in peer-reviewed literature over the last few years show that the Antarctic is getting colder and the ice is growingand a new 2006 study in Geophysical Research Letters found that the sun was responsible for up to 50% of 20th-century warming.
  • "Global Warming" Stopped in 1998: Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter has noted that there is indeed a problem with global warming -- it stopped in 1998. "According to official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the global average temperature did not increase between 1998-2005... this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere..."
  • Alaska Cooling: According to data released on July 14, 2006 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the January through June Alaska statewide average temperature was "0.55F (0.30C) cooler than the 1971-2000 average."
  • Oceans Cooling: Another bombshell to hit the global warming alarmists and their speculative climate modeling came in a September article in the Geophysical Research Letters which found that over 20% of the heat gained in the oceans since the mid-1950s was lost in just two years...
  • Light Hurricane Season & Early Winter: Despite predictions that 2006 would bring numerous tropical storms, 2006's surprisingly light hurricane season and the record early start of this year's winter in many parts of the U.S. have further put a damper on the constant doomsaying of the global warming alarmists and their media allies.
  • Droughts Less Frequent: the claim that droughts would be more frequent, severe and wide ranging during global warming, has now being exposed as fallacious. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters authored by Konstantinos Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier finds droughts in the U.S. becoming "shorter, less frequent and cover a small portion of the country over the last century."
  • Global Warming Will Not Lead to Next Ice Age : Fears that global warming could lead to the next ice age, as promoted in the 2004 Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow" are also unsupportable. "...two different research teams present convincing evidence [ in Geophysical Research Letters ] that no slowdown is occurring whatsoever,"according to Virginia State Climatologist Patrick Michaels, editor of the website World Climate Report.
  • Study Shows Greenland's Ice Growing, Arctic warmer in 1930's than today:
    A 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed
    that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass. Also, according to the International Arctic Research Institute, despite all of the media hype, the Arctic was warmer in the 1930's than today.
  • Polar Bears Not Going Extinct: Polar bears are not facing a crisis, according to biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut. "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present," Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006.
  • Media Darling James Hansen Hypes Alarmism: As all this new data debunking climate alarmism mounts, the mainstream media chooses to ignore it and instead focus on the dire predictions of the number-one global warming media darling, NASA's James Hansen. The increasingly alarmist Hansen is featured frequently in the media to bolster sky-is-falling climate scare reports. His recent claim -- that the Earth is nearing its hottest point in one million years -- has been challenged by many scientists. Hansen's increasingly frightening climate predictions follow his 2003 concession that the use of "extreme scenarios" was an appropriate tactic to drive the public's attention to the urgency of global warming. Hansen also received a $250,000 grant form Teresa Heinz's Foundation and then subsequently endorsed her husband John Kerry for President and worked
    closely with Al Gore to promote his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." See also http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/dai_complete.pdf.
  • For a comprehensive review of the media's embarrassing 100-year history of
    alternating between promoting fears of a coming ice age and global warming,
    see Environment & Public Works Chairman James Inhofe's September 25, 2006,
    Senate floor speech
    debunking the media and climate alarmism.
  • To read and watch Senator Inhofe on CNN discuss global warming, go to:
    http://www.epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep
  • "Inhofe Correct On Global Warming," by David Deming, geophysicist, adjunct
    scholar with the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs http://www.ocpathink.org
    and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.
LINKS: Nuremberg-style trials proposed for global warming skeptics - US Senate Committe on Environment
Open Kyoto to debate - Canada.Com
Southern hemisphere ignores global warming - 'The Reference Frame' physics blog

RELATED: Science, Politics-US, Global Warming

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

FYI: the list of 2006 cinvidcation is messed up (on IE6). Check your html?

Anonymous said...

As was said on an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit on Monday, global warming is "bullshit". As they said on that episode, many of the same people that are claiming global warming is happening due to carbon dioxide were claiming decades ago that it would cause an ice age and they did this switch without pause for breath.

Peter Cresswell said...

Fixed now, I trust?

Anonymous said...

not just Canadian scientists, PC ... they're from all over the world, including our own local sceptics: Augie Auer, Vincent Gray and Chris de Freitas.

Peter Cresswell said...

Ah, well spotted Hemi. I've added that news. Thanks. :-)

Anonymous said...

One thing I have noticed about the following facts are that they are mostly the same people (lefties).

#1) The majority of the lefties are Pro-Global-Warming.

#2) The majority of the lefties do suport ban on whaling.

#3) The majority of the lefties are against the shifting of the rare snails from the mining area in the South Island.

#4) The majority of the lefties don't like inovators like Bill Gates & big corporations.

#4) The majority of the lefties support Mat McCarten and those demanding outrages wage increase while they (Mat & those like him), don't start a business and pay their workers $150 per hour.

#5) The majority of the lefties support that McDonald ads on TV should be banned or banned fast food from the country altogether.

#5) The majority of the lefties all support any form of Government that can act as nanny to its own citizens.

#6) The majority of the lefties don't like the US or Israel, regardless of what those countries do.

#7) ... and on and on and on and on...